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My Life As Author And Editor
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After 35 years in a sealed vault, the autobiography of America's great social and literary critic at last comes to light. Full of revealing anecdotes and biting observations, these pages make abundantly clear why he was our greatest social commentator, and why he has had an enduring impact on American society and writing.
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While it does include a very telling look into the life of Mencken and his inner circle of aristocratic literary society, this memoir is very rough and incoherent at times. He includes an insane amount of trivial detail that would bore even the most devoted of Menckophiles--such as hyperspecific details of his sales and royalty figures broken down month-by-month, and even notes about his income tax filings. Why he felt this stuff was an important inclusion in his historical reveals a lot about h
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Nothing much to say here except how much I love Mencken's voice.
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Very readable autobiography. On the one hand, you get a great look at Mencken himself, what drove him and what he thought of his own accomplishments. And you also have Mencken's shrewd mind cutting through the literary figures of his day. Not only is that just fun, but it provides an interesting look at early 20th century America, too. It drags in some places, especially when he tells you yet another story of some strange literary figure and their personal issues, but it's definitely worth the r
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That was absolutely a tough mark to come to a decision on. Within the final 100 pages, I figured I'd give it at least 3 stars, but within the final stanza, I just fell completely out of care. In all, it's a disheveled mess of a read. The timelines of thought just jump all over the place, which would be fine and dandy if each chapter was dedicated to a friendship. But instead, the cast and characters of his life pop up here and there with backtracking and forward tracking galore. Less an autobiog
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While the book is full of arcane references to people that most of us who are currently alive have ever heard of, and he tends to beat the stale air out of topics of little current relevance, it is still the marvelous prose of H.L.Mencken, so...
The most sexist and racist author of all times. He was a little too prideful of that though.
This is an incomplete work, originally intended to cover at least two more decades of his life, cut short by his incapacitating stroke in late 1948. It clearly lacked his usual care in editing, as there is significant repetition of information and odd lacunae that I'm certain he'd have addressed during his editing process. At the time this book was published (well after Mencken's death, at his specific direction to his literary executors), the casual anti-semitism of some of his comments caused
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Thought it was quite interesting. He shows a side of some authors that one does not always realize or see.
Just had this problem with him being a bit full of himself.
Just had this problem with him being a bit full of himself.
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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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“My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between that other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even to be malicious.”
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“No writer, in truth, is ever really a free agent. What he does in his trade is determined not only by his immediate environment and the ideational currents of his time, but also and more especially by the play of inherited forces and predispositions within him.”
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