Highly Irregular: The Newspaper Columns of Carl Bode

by Carl Bode

Although he is the leading biographer of Mencken and now writes for the paper Mencken himself once wrote for, Carl Bode is his own man before a typewriter and, as this collection shows, a singularly acute observer of popular culture.

 

In his preface to this first collection of his popular newspaper columns written for the Washington Post and the Balti­more Evening Sun, Carl Bode says about the columns that in their background is “a mixed bag of facts: that I teach American literature at the University of Mary­land in College Park; that I divide much of my off-campus time between Washing­ton and Baltimore; that both as a writer and a teacher I’m attracted by two dizzy­ingly different literary rebels, Henry David Thoreau and H. L. Mencken; that I am delighted by my students and bemused by their ways; and that I’m fasci­nated by the popular culture of our times as it shifts and sashays around.”

 

Readers who relish the human comedy in its American mode will especially en­joy this collection of pieces by an emi­nent student of our civilization who wears his learning lightly.

176 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1974