Mencken believed that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were sacred documents that set clear lines of demarcation that no government should trespass. “The two main ideas that run through all of my ...writing”, he said, “whether it be literary criticism or political polemic, are these: I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud”. Freedom had always been an issue with Mencken: first, freedom from his father's choice of a career; later, as he developed as a critic, from the Victorian Puritanism that stifled American life; then, from governmental laws that violated civil liberties for whites and blacks; and finally, during the two world wars, freedom from censorship of the press.
Originally published in 1984. The Sage in Harlem establishes H. L. Mencken as a catalyst for the blossoming of black literary culture in the 1920s and chronicles the intensely productive exchange of ...ideas between Mencken and two generations of black writers: the Old Guard who pioneered the Harlem Renaissance and the Young Wits who sought to reshape it a decade later. From his readings of unpublished letters and articles from black publications of the time, Charles Scruggs argues that black writers saw usefulness in Mencken's critique of American culture, his advocacy of literary realism, and his satire of America. They understood that realism could free them from the pernicious stereotypes that had hounded past efforts at honest portraiture, and that satire could be the means whereby the white man might be paid back in his own coin. Scruggs contends that the content of Mencken's observations, whether ludicrously narrow or dazzlingly astute, was of secondary importance to the Harlem intellectuals. It was the honesty, precision, and fearlessness of his expression that proved irresistible to a generation of artists desperate to be taken seriously. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to Mencken as an uncompromising—and uncondescending—commentator whose criticisms were informed by deep interest in African American life but guided by the same standards he applied to all literature, whatever its source. The Sage in Harlem demonstrates how Mencken, through the example of his own work, his power as editor of the American Mercury, and his dedication to literary quality, was able to nurture the developing talents of black authors from James Weldon Johnson to Richard Wright.
Marriage as an economic transaction between unequal partners was a common topic in literature long before it became one for formal analysis in works such as Becker's Treatise on the Family (1981). It ...was also a central issue in the emancipation movement as it gained strength in the West through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, writing in 1909 on the American family, noted the increasing rejection of the view of marriage as, for women, "about the only way to a respectable maintenance"; indeed, he concluded that "economic considerations are mostly opposed to married life" (Archives, PDR 33 (4): 819). The mass entry of women into the formal labor force in the World War I mobilization further supported this reality. A lightly satirical book appearing at this time, In Defense of Women (1918), illustrates the case. It was an early work of H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), journalist and essayist, best known as the author of The American Language. In a preface to the expanded 1922 edition of In Defense of Women, Mencken wrote: "The book by no means pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of any novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain form certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass of sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question." On marriage, this chiefly meant the superior position of women in marriage bargaining. (The book, like many of Mencken's later writings, is more bitingly satirical on other matters, especially religion and politics.) The excerpt is from the final chapter, titled The New Age, of H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, rev. ed. 1922), pp. 181-185.
...magazines became an important medium for selling consumer goods to mass audiences. ...new opportunities emerged for aspiring writers to gain exposure to a wide audience. Over the decades, her age ...as recorded by census takers suggested that her year of birth was variously 1886, 1883, 1888, 1895, and 1896.3 Richard C. Winegard, who consulted not only her own accounts and published information but also people who knew her in Fort Smith and elsewhere, calculated that she was most likely bom in 1885 or 1886.4 Carolyn LeMaster, who profiled Thyra Samter Winslow in her history of Arkansas Jewry, on the other hand, gave 1893.5 Winegard found, however, that the records of Fort Smith High School show that she graduated in 1903 and that she attended the University of Missouri in 1903-1905.6 Thyra came from a German Jewish family. First published in March 1900, Smart Set lasted until July 1930, a fairly long life for a magazine in those days.
H. L. Mencken's reputation as a journalist and cultural critic of the twentieth century has endured well into the twenty-first. His early contributions as a writer, however, are not very well known. ...He began his journalistic career as early as 1899 and in 1910 cofounded the Baltimore Evening Sun. The next year he initiated a column—The Free Lance—that ran six days a week for four and a half years, until the Sun discontinued it, partially in response to Mencken's controversial defense of Germany during World War One. In this early forum for his renowned wit, Mencken broached many of the issues to which he would return again and again over his career, establishing himself as a fearless iconoclast willing to tackle the most divisive subjects and apply a heady mix of observation, satire, and repartee to clear away what he regarded as the "saturnalia of bunk" that clouded American thinking. The Free Lance reveals Mencken at his scintillating best as a journalist, polemicist, and satirist. These columns are collected here for the first time, edited and annotated by Mencken expert and critic S. T. Joshi. This extraordinary collection is an invaluable resource for Mencken scholars and fans and provides an entertaining immersion into the early twentieth- century American zeitgeist.
In November 1915, popular Baltimore minister and anti-vice reformer Kenneth G. Murray became enmeshed in scandal after he allegedly attempted to engage in sex with another man at the Y.M.C.A. The ...revelation of Murray’s alleged queerness became a flashpoint in ongoing contestations over anti-vice reform and the legitimacy of using state power to enforce Christian morality. In the hands of his political opponents, most notably H.L. Mencken, Murray’s apparent homosexuality became a tool for vindicating long-standing assertions that men who campaigned for state-enforced morality were hypocritical and motivated in their activism by sexual and gendered pathologies. In tracing print reactions to Murray’s public exposure, this essay argues that homosexuality proved to be a powerful political weapon against progressive anti-vice campaigning like Murray’s because it was capable of reconciling competing stereotypes of religiously motivated anti-vice reformers as simultaneously overly sexual and impotent, feminized and pathologically masculine. The Murray scandal also opened the door for critiques of muscular Christianity, which made it an early example of how the sexual diagnosis of religious figures and reformers could be used to discredit social and religious activism.
During the early twentieth century – when the United States was receiving an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants, and “standardization” was a dominant, yet polarizing, concept – having a single ...national language that unified Americans became a controversial topic in public discourse. In The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, Ruth Suckow, like many authors at the time, used immigrant language as a foil for midwestern speech to demonstrate its “standard” Americanness. But, as this essay will show, by using other regional American dialects in a similar manner, she questioned how “Americanness” was being understood and recognized during this period in the United States.
Like any star-struck tourist worth his salt, I visited one of the big studio lots during a 2007 trip to Los Angeles. I chose Warner Bros, because I knew that it had been the site of some of my ...favorite classics, including The Maltese Falcon and A Streetcar Named Desire. But the real bits of interest came later in the tour, those parts of the lot that function as outdoor sets: the New York street, the French and midwestern streets, and the wooded back lot used for jungle and forest scenes. The lot had not always looked like this. Until 2004, there was another set, called "Laramie Street," that had been used to film the studios Wild West scenes, both for film and television.
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Euphemism is a common linguistic phenomenon in human society and plays an important role in human daily communicative activities. In the process of the development of euphemism, there are many ...studies on euphemism. On the one hand, it has achieved rich achievements, and on the other hand, there are also deficiencies. This article will discuss the pragmatic functions of English euphemism under the guidance of pragmatic principles. By observing and studying the applied examples of euphemism in life, at the same time to link the guidance of pragmatic principles, the paper concludes that the euphemism plays different functions in people’s lives, and enables both parties to successfully complete communication.
As American journalism shape-shifts into multimedia pandemonium and seems to diminish rapidly in influence and integrity, the controversial career of H. L. Mencken, the most powerful individual ...journalist of the twentieth century, is a critical text for anyone concerned with the balance of power between the free press, the government, and the corporate plutocracy. Mencken, the belligerent newspaperman from Baltimore, was not only the most outspoken pundit of his day but also, by far, the most widely read, and according to many critics the most gifted American writer ever nurtured in a newsroom-a vanished world of typewriter banks and copy desks that electronic advances have precipitously erased.Nearly 60 years after his death, Mencken's memory and monumental verbal legacy rest largely in the hands of literary scholars and historians, to whom he will always be a curious figure, unchecked and alien and not a little distasteful. No faculty would have voted him tenure. Hal Crowther, who followed in many of Mencken's footsteps as a reporter, magazine editor, literary critic, and political columnist, focuses on Mencken the creator, the observer who turned his impressions and prejudices into an inimitable group portrait of America, painted in prose that charms and glowers and endures. Crowther, himself a working polemicist who was awarded theBaltimore Sun's Mencken prize for truculent commentary, examines the origin of Mencken's thunderbolts-where and how they were manufactured, rather than where and on whom they landed.Mencken was such an outrageous original that contemporary writers have made him a political shuttlecock, defaming or defending him according to modern conventions he never encountered. Crowther argues that loving or hating him, admiring or despising him are scarcely relevant. Mencken can inspire and he can appall. The point is that he mattered, at one time enormously, and had a lasting effect on the national conversation. No writer can afford to ignore his craftsmanship or success, or fail to be fascinated by his strange mind and the world that produced it. This book is a tribute-though by no means a loving one-to a giant from one of his bastard sons.
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