Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also earned him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles.
As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, Prohibition, and representative democracy, the last of which he once defined as "the worship of jackals by jackasses". Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.
Mencken opposed the American entry into World War I and World War II. Some of the opinions in his private diary entries have been described by some researchers as racist and antisemitic, although this characterization has been disputed. Larry S. Gibson argued that Mencken's views on race changed significantly between his early and later private writings which started when he was 50, and that it was more accurate to describe Mencken as elitist rather than racist. He seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he wrote, "because it is honest; it admits the central fact of human nature... A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid."
His longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House. His papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.
Early life and education Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 12, 1880. He was the son of Anna Margaret (Abhau) and August Mencken Sr., a cigar factory owner. He was of German ancestry and spoke German in his childhood. When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street facing Union Square park in the Union Square neighborhood of old West Baltimore. Apart from five years residing elsewhere during the marriage that left him a widower in middle age, Mencken would stay there for the rest of his life.
In his bestselling memoir Happy Days, he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy".Happy Days, p. vii
When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life".St. Petersburg Times – September 23, 1987 He became determined to become a writer and read voraciously. In one winter while in high school he read William Makepeace Thackeray and then "proceeded backward to Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Johnson and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century". He read the entire canon of Shakespeare and became an ardent fan of Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Huxley. As a boy, Mencken also had practical interests, photography and chemistry in particular, and eventually had a home chemistry laboratory in which he performed experiments of his own design, some of them inadvertently dangerous.Newspaper Days, 1899–1906, p. 58.
He began his primary education in the mid-1880s at Professor Knapp's School on the east side of Holliday Street between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the Holliday Street Theatre and across from the newly constructed Baltimore City Hall. The site today is the War Memorial and City Hall Plaza laid out in 1926 in memory of World War I dead. At 15, in June 1896, he graduated as valedictorian from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, at the time a males-only mathematics, technical and science-oriented public high school.
He worked for three years in his father's cigar factory. He disliked the work, especially the sales aspect of it, and resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898 he took a writing class at the Cosmopolitan University, a free correspondence school established by The Cosmopolitan magazine. This was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal post-secondary education in journalism, or in any other subject. Upon his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business passed to his uncle, and Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism. He applied in February 1899 to the Morning Herald newspaper (which became the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1900) and was hired part-time, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired as a full-time reporter.
Career
Mencken served as a reporter at the Herald for six years. Fewer than two-and-a-half years after the Great Baltimore Fire, the paper was purchased in June 1906 by Charles H. Grasty, the owner and editor of The News since 1892 and competing owner and publisher Gen. Felix Agnus, of the town's oldest (since 1773) and largest daily, The Baltimore American. They proceeded to divide the staff, assets and resources of The Herald between them. Mencken then moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for Charles H. Grasty. He continued to contribute to The Sun, The Evening Sun (founded 1910) and The Sunday Sun full-time until 1948, when he stopped writing after suffering a stroke.
Mencken began writing the editorials and opinion pieces that made his name at The Sun. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, and even poetry, which he later revealed. In 1908, he became a literary critic for The Smart Set magazine, and in 1924 he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf. It soon developed a national circulation and became highly influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, Mencken resigned as editor.
During the Great Depression, Mencken did not support the New Deal, which cost him popularity. In 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia".Manchester, p. 252 In the mid-1930s, Mencken feared President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal liberalism as a powerful force. Mencken was "deeply conservative, resentful of change, looking back upon the 'happy days' of a bygone time, wanted no part of the world that the New Deal promised to bring in" according to Charles A. Fecher. Mencken had strong reservations regarding US participation in World War II. He ceased writing for The Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing on his memoirs and other projects as editor while he served as an adviser for the paper that had been his home for nearly his entire career.
In 1948, he briefly returned to the political scene to cover the presidential election in which President Harry S. Truman faced Republican Thomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party. His later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays that were first published in The New Yorker and then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
Personal life
Mencken cultivated a public persona of a contented bachelor, but he did ultimately have long-term relationships with two women. The first was the writer and nurse Marion Bloom, whom he met around 1914. They had an on-and-off romantic relationship for about a decade. Their correspondence (later published) makes clear it was a genuine love affair, though Mencken ultimately did not marry her, which caused her considerable heartbreak.
On August 27, 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a German American professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author eighteen years his junior. Haardt had led an unsuccessful effort in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment supporting women's suffrage.Alabama rejected the Nineteenth Amendment on September 22, 1919, though it later ratified it as a symbolic gesture on September 8, 1953. The two met in 1923, after Mencken delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations between the sexes, had gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me", Mencken said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one." Even more startling, he was marrying an Alabama native, despite his having written scathing essays about the American South. Haardt was in poor health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken. He had always championed her writing, and after her death, had a collection of her short stories published under the title Southern Album. Haardt's childhood friend the Alabama author Sara Mayfield wrote extensively about Haardt and Mencken in her 1968 book The Constant Circle: H. L. Mencken and His Friends.
Last years
On November 23, 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke, which left him aware and fully conscious but nearly unable to read or write and able to speak only with difficulty. After his stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to classical music, and after some recovery of his ability to speak, talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense, as if he were already dead. During the last year of his life, his friend and biographer William Manchester read to him daily..
Death Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956. He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery. A very small, short, and private service was held, in accordance with Mencken's wishes."Mencken: The American Iconoclast" By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. Page 549
Although it does not appear on his tombstone, Mencken, during his Smart Set days, wrote a joking epitaph for himself:
Beliefs
In his capacity as editor, Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time, including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Anita Loos, Ben Hecht, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Alfred Knopf, as well as a mentor to several young reporters, including Alistair Cooke. He also championed artists whose works he considered worthy. For example, he asserted that books such as Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929), by Eddie Cantor (ghostwritten by David Freedman) did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined. He also mentored John Fante. Thomas Hart Benton illustrated an edition of Mencken's book Europe After 8:15.
Mencken also published many works under various pseudonyms, including Owen Hatteras, John H Brownell, William Drayham, WLD Bell, and Charles Angoff. As a ghostwriter for the physician Leonard K. Hirshberg, he wrote a series of articles, and in 1910, most of a book about the care of babies.
Mencken was an outspoken critic of Prohibition. His detestation of the Eighteenth Amendment aligned Mencken with the cultural elite of his time. He led intellectual and emotional campaigns to eradicate Prohibition and went as far to vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 to accomplish this abolition of the Eighteenth Amendment. Mencken viewed the freedom to drink as critical liberty and considered alcohol as one of humanity's greatest inventions.