In his 1917 essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” Mencken sought the origins of modern American literature’s didactic style, which was devoid of difficult ideas as well as literary nuance, play, or depth. His genealogy of American anti-intellectualism followed many of the same lines as Santayana’s and Brooks’s. It began with the austere, self-accusing Calvinist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who lost his dominance with the rise of his nineteenth-century descendant, the philistine, a “trader” or “peasant” in Mencken’s version. The philistine is at home in this world but never
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