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Perhaps America's foremost literary stylist and most mordant wit, Mencken's most engaging writing told about his own life and experiences. In Mencken on Mencken, veteran Mencken editor and scholar S. T. Joshi has assembled a hefty collection of the best of Mencken's autobiographical pieces that have not appeared previously in book form. These forty-four selections cover a wide variety of topics ranging from incidents from Mencken's everyday life to reflections on friends and colleagues to his careers as author, journalist, and editor, to his travels abroad.
As a journalist in Baltimore, Mencken encountered many unusual characters: a professional mourner hired by a beer distiller, a wagon driver who slept through the great Baltimore fire of 1904, a confirmed bachelor who left town to avoid the clutches of a predatory widow. He provides accounts of literary figures he knew, such as Theodore Dreiser, and ruminations on his work at the Baltimore Sun and as editor for the magazines Smart Set and the American Mercury. A superb travel writer, Mencken gives us a rollicking account of beer-drinking in Munich, astute observations of political unrest in Cuba, and carefully drawn scenes from a long tour he and his wife made of the Mediterranean in 1934.
Joshi has thoroughly annotated the pieces and also compiled an extensive glossary of names and terms that Mencken mentions. Mencken on Mencken offers a fully rounded self-portrait of one of America's most colorful personalities and most extraordinary men of letters.
Introduction 1
A note on this edition 13
Prologue Henry Louis Mencken (1905) 15
Memories of a Long Life
Early Days 17
Old Days 18
Surdi Audiunt 21
The Passing of "The Hill" 27
West Baltimore 32
Mr. Kipling 35
Man of Means 37
Tale of a Traveller 38
An Evening on the House 45
Baltimoriana 52
Obsequies in the Grand Manner 55
Love Story 62
The Life of an Artist 70
James Huneker 76
The Life of Tone 85
Author and Journalist
A Footnote on Journalism 92
Reminiscences of the Herald 96
On Breaking into Type 99
Walter Abell and the Sun 103
Twenty-five Years of the Evening Sun 106
A Word about the Smart Set 109
Foreword to A Bibliography of the Writings of H. L. Mencken 116
Five Years of the American Mercury 117
Ten Years of the American Mercury 123
Memoirs of an Editor 126
The Worst Trade of Them All 131
Why I Am Not a Book Collector 135
Thinker
Off the Grand Banks 139
Meditations at Vespers 142
What Is This Talk about Utopia? 145
What I Believe 148
On the Meaning of Life 158
"Generally Political" 160
World Traveler
At the Edge of the Spanish Main 168
The Beeriad 172
At Large in London 184
Reminiscences of 1917 197
The Black Country 200
West Indian Notes 203
Our Footloose Correspondents 206
Foreign Parts 208
The Adriatic: East Side 224
Epilogue
Henry Louis Mencken (1936) 229
Notes 231
Glossary of Names 239
Bibliography of Originals Appearances 255
Index 257
Overview
Perhaps America's foremost literary stylist and most mordant wit, Mencken's most engaging writing told about his own life and experiences. In Mencken on Mencken, veteran Mencken editor and scholar S. T. Joshi has assembled a hefty collection of the best of Mencken's autobiographical pieces that have not appeared previously in book form. These forty-four selections cover a wide variety of topics ranging from incidents from Mencken's everyday life to reflections on friends and colleagues to his careers as author, ...