Writings in the Baltimore Evening Sun, 1923-1924: Edited and Annotated by S. T. Joshi

by H.L. Mencken, S.T. Joshi (Editor)

In this volume of H. L. Mencken’s writings, his customary “Monday articles” are frequently augmented with book reviews published on other days of the week. He lambastes the autobiography of Edward W. Bok (editor of Ladies’ Home Journal), praises books by Hermann Sudermann, Havelock Ellis, and Sherwood Anderson, and finds much of interest in Marie Curie’s biography of her husband, Pierre. His other articles cover a wide range of topics. Although he says little about the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding in August 1923, Mencken ruminates on the Teapot Dome scandal that tainted much of Harding’s brief administration. He also ponders the rise of Christian fundamentalism and predicts a “battle royal” between moderate and radical Protestant sects. In the summer of 1924, Mencken regales us with pungents accounts of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The latter was, in his view, fatally corrupted by the dominance of the Ku Klux Klan, which exercised a major role in the choice of the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis.

370 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 8, 2021

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)