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Prejudices: First Series
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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
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Paperback, 250 pages
Published
May 4th 2005
by Kessinger Publishing
(first published 1919)
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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."
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