Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir by H. L. Mencken

by H.L. Mencken, Fred Hobson (Editor)

"No greater prose stylist ever wrote for an American newspaper. It is always useful and enjoyable to be reminded of this, as Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work most certainly does... Should be required reading not merely for all newspaper people but for all those who labor in what we now call 'the media.'"―Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World In January 1991 the Enoch Pratt Free Library opened the sealed manuscript of H. L. Mencken's "Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work." Written in 1941-42 and bequeathed to the library under time-lock upon Mencken's death in 1956, it is among the very last of his papers opened to the public. Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work , a one-volume edition of highlights from the manuscript, vividly pictures the excitement of newspaper life in the heyday of print journalism. Here Mencken colorfully recalls his years―mostly with the Baltimore Evening Sun ―as a reporter and a writer of editorials that always caused a stir among the public and riots of indignation among his enemies. The volume includes important new material on his coverage of presidential candidates from 1912 to 1940 and the 1925 trial of the man he called the "infidel Scopes." "The book reveals a man who loved food, alcohol, cigars, and good friends... Mencken had so many friends in high places that a few well-placed telephone calls invariably got him to the heart of the matter and revealed more information than any other reporter could solicit."―Raymond L. Fischer, USA Today

Genres: Journalism

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

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

[Dan]

Some stretches are so good, they could have been used in "Newspaper Days." Others are for Mencken completists only. The account of his trip to Germany in 1938 shows that despite being the greatest American writer not named Mark Twain, Mencken was not a deep thinker and in fact could be breathtakingly stupid, while the 1919 manifesto for the Baltimore Sunpapers reads like the second-prize entry in an essay contest for high school libertarians. But worth it for the flashes of brilliant writing for which the best word is still "Menckenesque."