Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “Prejudices: First Series” as Want to Read:
Prejudices: First Series
by
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern
...more
Get A Copy
Paperback, 250 pages
Published
May 4th 2005
by Kessinger Publishing
(first published 1919)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Reader Q&A
To ask other readers questions about
Prejudices,
please sign up.
Be the first to ask a question about Prejudices
This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
Showing 1-30
Start your review of Prejudices: First Series
A volume of literary criticism featuring Mencken's noted acerbic style. The reviews are irreverent, iconoclastic, and nakedly elitist; although he does seem fair-minded. The middle-brow, the Puritanical, the didactic, and the dull are utterly destroyed. My regional pride was hurt as William Allen White ("The Sage of Emporia") was flayed by Mencken; although I have to admit I didn't even know William Allen White (a journalist and newspaper publisher) wrote fiction. Mencken evaluates the legacy of
...more
find myself returning to mencken every year. he makes cynicism and hate feel refreshing. consider this review a blanket endorsement of veerythings he wrote. though "the cult of hope"in prejudices stands out.
...more
10% valuable insights and 90% bitching
„[T]he ineradicable peasant suspicion of the man who is having a better time in the world”
Yuck! What a grossly arrogant statement! It’s exactly this elitist kind of thinking that is responsible for so many problems in the world, and which, at the same time, masks an ingrained inferiority complex on the part of those who adhere to it.
This might be a stock reaction of the typical do-gooders who have raised the pennant of equality so high as to obstruct any ray of light that might fall into their e ...more
Yuck! What a grossly arrogant statement! It’s exactly this elitist kind of thinking that is responsible for so many problems in the world, and which, at the same time, masks an ingrained inferiority complex on the part of those who adhere to it.
This might be a stock reaction of the typical do-gooders who have raised the pennant of equality so high as to obstruct any ray of light that might fall into their e ...more
I confined myself to the essays on religion, love, death, and psychology. I decided to explore Mencken knowing that his writing was admired by Christopher Hitchens. I am not disappointed and I leave with the memory of some truly meaningful ideas and passages. I just feel that the compilation of essays could have been more thoughtfully compiled. Think Hitchens with "Love, Poverty and War". That said, a collection is intended to cover as broad a spectrum of interests as possible so the criticism m
...more
If you are not laughing yourself to sleep each night there is something seriously wrong with you. Is that how the quotation goes? I think it is O.K. now and then to feel like the whole world's a bunch of ninkompoops annd that guys like us should go grab a beer and say to hell with it.
...more
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
Readers also enjoyed
Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken became one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and '30s, writing about all the shams and con artists in the world. He attacked chiropractors and the Ku Klux Klan, politicians and other journalists. Most of all, he attacked Puritan morality. He called Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
At the height o ...more
At the height o ...more
News & Interviews
In most romances, a romp in the hay comes after many chapters of meeting cute, silent pining, and steamy banter. Not so for books that...
23 likes · 2 comments
1 trivia question
More quizzes & trivia...
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
—
676 likes
“I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.”
—
17 likes
More quotes…
