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H. L. Mencken's Autobiography #1-3
The Days Trilogy: Happy Days / Newspaper Days / Heathen Days / Days Revisited: Unpublished Commentary
In 1936, at the age of fifty-five, H. L. Mencken published a reminiscence of his Baltimore boyhood in The New Yorker. With this modest beginning, Mencken embarked on what would become the Days trilogy, a long and magnificent adventure in autobiography by America’s greatest journalist. Finding it “always agreeable to ponder upon the adventures of childhood” (as he wrote in his diary), Mencken created more of these masterful novelistic evocations of a bygone era, eventually collected in Happy Days (1940). The book was an immediate critical and popular success, surprising many of its readers with its glimpses of a less curmudgeonly Mencken.
Urged by New Yorker editor Harold Ross to send yet more pieces, Mencken moved on from his childhood to revisit the beginnings of his legendary career. Newspaper Days (1941) charts the rise of the brilliant, ambitious young newspaperman, in an astonishingly short time, from cub reporter to managing editor of the Baltimore Herald. Among the book’s memorable episodes are the display of Mencken’s “talent for faking” in his invented dispatches of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War—accounts that largely turned out to be accurate—and his riveting narrative of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. “In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, . . . today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire.”
The final volume of the published trilogy, Heathen Days (1943), recounts his varied excursions as one of America’s most famous men, and one who, by his own account, “enjoyed himself immensely,” including his bibulous adventures during Prohibition and his reporting of the 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution.
Until now, however, the story told in Mencken’s beloved Days books has been incomplete. In the 1940s, Mencken began making extensive notes about the published books, commenting on what he had written and adding new material—but stipulating that these writings were not to be made public until twenty-five years after his death. Days Revisited presents more than two hundred pages of this material for the first time. Commentaries are keyed to the main text they gloss with subtle marks in the margin (the volume includes two ribbons to allow readers to flip back to the notes), and they are supplemented by rare photographs, many taken by Mencken himself. Here is Mencken’s classic autobiography as it has never been seen before.
Urged by New Yorker editor Harold Ross to send yet more pieces, Mencken moved on from his childhood to revisit the beginnings of his legendary career. Newspaper Days (1941) charts the rise of the brilliant, ambitious young newspaperman, in an astonishingly short time, from cub reporter to managing editor of the Baltimore Herald. Among the book’s memorable episodes are the display of Mencken’s “talent for faking” in his invented dispatches of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War—accounts that largely turned out to be accurate—and his riveting narrative of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. “In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, . . . today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire.”
The final volume of the published trilogy, Heathen Days (1943), recounts his varied excursions as one of America’s most famous men, and one who, by his own account, “enjoyed himself immensely,” including his bibulous adventures during Prohibition and his reporting of the 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution.
Until now, however, the story told in Mencken’s beloved Days books has been incomplete. In the 1940s, Mencken began making extensive notes about the published books, commenting on what he had written and adding new material—but stipulating that these writings were not to be made public until twenty-five years after his death. Days Revisited presents more than two hundred pages of this material for the first time. Commentaries are keyed to the main text they gloss with subtle marks in the margin (the volume includes two ribbons to allow readers to flip back to the notes), and they are supplemented by rare photographs, many taken by Mencken himself. Here is Mencken’s classic autobiography as it has never been seen before.
750 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
7 people are currently reading
220 people want to read
About the author
H.L. Mencken
636 books727 followersHenry 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)
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)
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June 15, 2015"Even on his best behavior, Mencken was the antithesis of today’s earnest, pseudo-objective journalistic ideal. Pick a page from Mencken at random, and you’re likely to find a line that’s quotable, funny, and, to the modern sensibility, offensive. One of my favorites is the epitaph that the great agnostic wrote for himself: “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.” Imagine a journalism professor today putting that line up on the projector. The thought alone is enough to give a dean of students the vapors.
By his own reckoning, Mencken produced over the course of his career approximately ten million words on literature, language, music, food, politics. The question of what work shows him at his best can thus probably never be settled. But the reader who wants to see Mencken at his most charming should look no further, for never was he more lovable than in Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days."
Kyle Peterson reviews: http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
By his own reckoning, Mencken produced over the course of his career approximately ten million words on literature, language, music, food, politics. The question of what work shows him at his best can thus probably never be settled. But the reader who wants to see Mencken at his most charming should look no further, for never was he more lovable than in Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days."
Kyle Peterson reviews: http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
May 19, 2015
What began as a retrospective series of charming stories about growing up in 1880s Baltimore over time turned into three volumes of experiences through the eyes of a newspaperman turned cultural critic and cheeky participant in human affairs. You can hear echoes of modern outlooks, how urban Baltimore was on fast decline, that government is a runaway train, some things never change. I appreciated hearing his experience with the introduction of syndicated comic strips for the Sunday pages, the great Baltimore fire of 1904, and his presence at the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. Written in the early 1940s by someone at roughly 60 years of age, there are anachronistic labels or terms that raise the eyebrows but easy to navigate around if you have an interest in how American life was pursued over 100 years ago.
November 14, 2017
Anyone interested in Henry Louis Mencken and/or the history of America (Rest In Peace) should read this, although it is not as intellectual, incendiary, political, or uproarious as his typical material. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers did a remarkable job of editing and annotating this discursive material. "If pedagogy weren't the puerile racket that it is," as Mencken himself would say, Mencken would still be a household name like Twain.
Update (November 13, 2017): The above was written on or around November 9, 2014. I will add that re-reading it was delightful and well worth it. It is a bit rambling and far from comprehensive (he barely mentions his wife), and it demonstrates that he was inconsistent politically and perhaps less than entirely honest in his dealings with some people (both of which are disappointing). None of that contradicts or qualifies anything I wrote above.
Update (November 13, 2017): The above was written on or around November 9, 2014. I will add that re-reading it was delightful and well worth it. It is a bit rambling and far from comprehensive (he barely mentions his wife), and it demonstrates that he was inconsistent politically and perhaps less than entirely honest in his dealings with some people (both of which are disappointing). None of that contradicts or qualifies anything I wrote above.
October 13, 2020
The Library of America has published a one-volume work containing all three of Mencken’s Days memoirs, the first two of which are chronologically arranged — Happy Days, 1880-1892 and Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 — while the third — Heathen Days, 1890-1936 — is a kind of addendum, adding specific sketches that could have been retroactively placed in the earlier two books.
Candidly, Mencken is not for everyone, no more so than he was in his own time (1880-1956). His subject matter, while very interesting for anyone who loves history, would probably seem quite boring to many, and his references to racial minorities can at times be, at the very least, insensitive, and, at the worst, offensive. While many of the terms he uses for Black people were unfortunately common back in the late 1890s and early 20th century, there is no reason at all why he could not have omitted them in favor of more neutral terms when he set to writing and editing these memoirs. (I do not recall him ever using the “n” word in these texts; his most common were blacks, Africans, Aframericans, and blackamoors — this latter a combination of “black” and “Moors,”a geographic/racial reference.)
On the other hand, he singles out a remarkable number of Blacks whom he remembers with fondness and respect, featuring their names, descriptions, and places of resident, people he knew as superb workers, expert craftspersons, kind, wise, and even noble, in contrast with legions of white people he cited as being just the opposite. It is clear that he shared the overall racial views of his time but did not make the mistake of treating every person he met as automatically fitting that stereotype.
Furthermore, he loves to “paint with a very broad brush” all sorts of people — cops, Irish, Italians, newspapermen, editors, theater workers, politicians, you name it. This is part of his type of humor which, as I have said, is clearly “not for everyone.”
OK, moving beyond this important point, Mencken does a superb job in conveying both what Baltimore — and much of the United States — was like to live in in the latter decades of the 19th century, and it reminds us of the ground that Progressive reformers found so fertile in years just around the corner: widespread disease, clatter-traps that passed for “housing,” open sewers running in the alleyways, much crudity, heavy drinking, and whoring by many “respectable” men.
Readers will also get quite an education about the politics of the time, the corrupt urban and state machines for which newspapermen (there were, as yet, few newspaper women) often worked, cheered, and derided, and the deal-making seen as normal in order for “things to get done.”
In the process of all this, you will meet a remarkable group of human beings, some memorable for their wit, wisdom, or accomplishments, others for their lack of these things.
Mencken is able to skewer a person through witty remarks about clothing, manner of speech, or ideological pretentiousness. He is, when all is said, an accurate observer of human behavior, and sometimes merciless in pointing out how our predilections continually get us — and our human race — into repeated bouts of great trouble.
People who are journalists, or just interested in journalism, will fund much that is edifying in these books, for Mencken was a journalist, an editor, a writer for newspapers and magazines, and an author of books. He takes you behind the scenes to see exactly how newspapers are produced, how “news” is gathered (or ferreted out), and of the ruthless competition — and warm bonhomie — that existed among newspaper rivals of old.
Personally, aside from the racial stereotypes referenced at the beginning, I found these interesting and, often, laugh-out-loud funny. Several times while reading these I burst our laughing so hard that my wife had me read to her the current passage, after which she, too, began laughing heartily.
I’m going to cite just one instance of this so that you can get a whiff of Mencken’s stuff: There was a certain upright fellow who was staying in one of Baltimore’s better hotel rooms who had the misfortune to get himself rather thoroughly sloshed one evening. Weaving his way back to the hotel carefully, he entered the lobby and found no one at the desk. So, tip-toeing quietly up the stairs, he headed for his usual room. Unfortunately, unbeknownst — or, at least, unremembered in his inebriated state — the hotel manager had switched him to another room just down the hall. Somehow he was able to get the door open, quietly slipped off his shoes and his outer clothes in the darkened rom, and then — with a sigh of relief — fell into the bed — landing on top of a female opera star of some renown! You can imagine the hullabaloo that ensued! She cried “rape,” he pleaded innocent, and all and sundry were embarrassed! Given his upright reputation, however, and the fact that he truly was an upright gentleman, all but the raging opera star accepted his explanation.
It is in the telling of this and so many other stories like it that Mencken makes you howl. If this strikes you as perhaps something of your cup of tea, have at it. Like all Library of America publications, this is printed on beautiful paper, the type is crisp, and it even features ribbons allowing you to mark you place.
July 31, 2019
The only section I read, Newspaper Days, was an entertaining memoir of HLM's time at the Baltimore Herald at the beginning of the 20th century. Lots o' funny stories about memorable people, and how journalism was practiced back in the day -- essentially, with a lot of beer & with casual attitudes toward conflicts of interest and adherence to the actual facts. (There's a whole chapter, in fact, on "synthesis of the news" -- that is, creative invention of what the writer really knows didn't happen.) HLM's own annotations to the manuscript, not included in the original edition, are included in this one, and add a lot of color & detail. What you might have to get over to enjoy the book -- and may not be able to -- is HLM's rampant racism & misogyny. As I recall, only one African-American is referred to by name in the whole book, and that's in the long record of someone else's monologue, and even she is referred to as "Sadie the [it's not the n-word, but I still can't bring myself to repeat it]." All other black people are anonymous "colored" people or "blackamoors." About the only women in the book who merit a name are the madams who ran the various brothels where HLM picked up a lot of gossip. All in all, a fun read about how fun it was to be a white male newspaperman/judge/politician/policeman back in the day in Baltimore.
May 10, 2024
I read this book several times and always appreciated his use of language. I liked the way he described his times, the city of Baltimore, his childhood, etc. I think he was probably brilliant, though I think he could also be spectacularly wrong...and right. I appreciated his admission of "stretchers" in the newspaper business. A look back at a different time by a guy with a sense of humor.
October 19, 2018
I have already reviewed the original three volumes. I just finished the unpublished Days Revisited. It was magnificent. Mencken's "the rest of the story" is where he names names and pulls no punches. It is well worth the time spent with the original curmudgeon.
August 27, 2018
H.L. Mencken's Days Trilogy consists of three autobiographies he penned in later life: Happy Days, Newspaper Days and Heathen Days. Or, as Mencken himself noted in the preface to the final volume, he should have titled them Happy Days I, II and III.
In Happy Days (1880-1892), Mencken shares his reminiscences of growing in Baltimore, Maryland at the end of the nineteenth century. He recalls his time at school, his family, his friends, some local characters, as well as some local characteristics of Baltimore in the 1880s.
Newspaper Days (1899-1906) carries on where Happy Days leaves off; Mencken's first steps into adulthood and journalism. From rookie to veteran reporter in a seemingly short span of time, Mencken packs in a lot of his adventures and misadventures (including the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904).
Heathen Days (1880-1936) spans a much longer length of time, starting from childhood right through to mature adulthood. While it lacks the central theme of the early two volumes, the recollections still carry the same warmth, clarity and sense of humour.
This collected edition also includes Mencken's unpublished commentary for all three volumes, which includes more anecdotes and information, and is as long as any of the other volumes.
In Happy Days (1880-1892), Mencken shares his reminiscences of growing in Baltimore, Maryland at the end of the nineteenth century. He recalls his time at school, his family, his friends, some local characters, as well as some local characteristics of Baltimore in the 1880s.
Newspaper Days (1899-1906) carries on where Happy Days leaves off; Mencken's first steps into adulthood and journalism. From rookie to veteran reporter in a seemingly short span of time, Mencken packs in a lot of his adventures and misadventures (including the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904).
Heathen Days (1880-1936) spans a much longer length of time, starting from childhood right through to mature adulthood. While it lacks the central theme of the early two volumes, the recollections still carry the same warmth, clarity and sense of humour.
This collected edition also includes Mencken's unpublished commentary for all three volumes, which includes more anecdotes and information, and is as long as any of the other volumes.
June 29, 2022
Mencken is the greatest writer this country ever produced, or at least tied with Mark Twain. But he wasn't a deep thinker, and his polemical stuff is often simple-minded in the style of high-school libertarians in every era. (He recognized his shortcomings in a way. See pg. 695 in "Notes on Newspaper Days" here: "It requires a conscious effort for me to pump up any genuine sympathy for the downtrodden, and in the end I usually conclude that they have their own follies and incapacitates to thank for their troubles. I don't think it would be fair to call me heartless, but my feelings for others are certainly concentrated upon my own class.")
Anyway, these memoirs are by far his most enjoyable books for general readers, but I'd recommend this edition especially to longtime fans. (I wouldn't recommend any edition to people not prepared to look past Mencken's bigotry.) The notes at the end add details he considered too juicy, or simply too libellous, for the original manuscripts. I note that he offers no extra information about the tale of the unnamed Herald reporter, the umbrella and the electric arc-light, a story I've always thought is too good to be authentic.
Anyway, these memoirs are by far his most enjoyable books for general readers, but I'd recommend this edition especially to longtime fans. (I wouldn't recommend any edition to people not prepared to look past Mencken's bigotry.) The notes at the end add details he considered too juicy, or simply too libellous, for the original manuscripts. I note that he offers no extra information about the tale of the unnamed Herald reporter, the umbrella and the electric arc-light, a story I've always thought is too good to be authentic.
September 5, 2011
This is one of my favorite books. It traces H.L.Mencken's journey from childhood through his work as a journalist and into his days as one of the most quoted of American iconoclasts.
December 2, 2012
All three of Mencken's excellent autobiographies in one volume.
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December 5, 2014814.52 M536d 2014
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