Prejudices: Third Series

by H.L. Mencken

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 editions that are true to the original work.

Paperback

First published May 26, 2006

About the author

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 of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

(from American Public Media)

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy]

A Book Owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald: https://static-prod.lib.princeton.edu...

[Clara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh Mencken, I really wanted to like you. Hitchens liked you, you're a legend of my home town, you have a fabulous vocabulary and you write so very well. The trouble is the you are the literary equivalent of a looker with little other merit. So appealing, but then you open your mouth:
"Adultery, in brief, is one of nature's devices for keeping the lowest orders of men from sinking to the level of downright simians: sometimes for a few brief years in youth, their wives and daughters are comely—and now and then the baron drinks more than he ought to."
There are endless quotes likes this, quotes that bear out that yes, you were the most patronizing sort of sexist, that you were appealingly racist, and most of all, that you were a classist snob of the silliest sort, smart enough to see politics for a corrupt mess, but somehow not recognizing business or aristocracy as having the same flaws. There's not one idea in this whole book - I gave you the full benefit of the doubt - that is more that an insistence for these kids (or women, or educators, or politicians, etc) to get off your lawn. Maybe Prohibition just made you cranky, but boy, I wish you'd put your talents to better use.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entertaining read. One can only imagine what the esteemed Mr. Mencken would have thought about civilisation in this present age.