Prejudices: The Complete Series

by H.L. Mencken

Few writers roiled the American cultural scene like Henry Louis Mencken. Pathbreaking journalist, trenchant social observer, and unbridled humorist, Mencken was the most provocative and influential cultural critic of the last century. To read him today is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as our own, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness. In the six volumes of Prejudices published between 1919 and 1927, Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Now, The Library of America restores the full text of Mencken's landmark work to print in a deluxe two- volume boxed set, ensuring that new generations of readers can rediscover his one-of-a-kind genius.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Writing, Journalism, Politics, Philosophy

1408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1927

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)

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern political discourse -- the bad kind -- inherited its all from this man. A fascinating collection, with a number of misses.
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Ranges from whiny to brilliant. The essay "On Education" (XIII in Volume 3) was the most reasonable position on that complex subject I've ever read.

[Nog · Rating 4 out of 5]

This set is probably more Mencken than you’ll ever need, unless you’re a fanatic. I purchased it from the Library of America because they had a great deal on it and I’d been meaning to read some Mencken at some point, given all the quotes from the Sage of Baltimore that other writers had been hawking.

The first thing that you should know about Mencken is that he calls Americans a “mob” or the “booboisie”. He’s not a big fan of democracy, laments the lack of an aristocracy (killed off by Jacksonians early on), and considers the whole enterprise a “clown show” that he just can’t tear himself away from. This, of course, is pretty strong stuff for the 1920’s, when, in the aftermath of our involvement in World War I, Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy” schtick had convinced most Americans that we were chosen by God (or someone or something) to strut the world stage with complete confidence that we could do no wrong. Mencken begs to differ, and in his most eloquent form of misanthropy debunks the whole premise. And for the most part, he’s right. In 2017, his disdain for the great unwashed masses looks pretty accurate.

The problem is, he wants to draw attention to the fact that, as of 1920, the USA hadn’t excelled in aesthetic, political, and social matters, ceding the high ground to Europe on almost every art form in particular. His America is one of charlatans and willing dupes, whether it be patent medicines or Methodism. He seems to be attempting to shame Americans into excelling in something (anything!) he considers worthwhile at the same time saying it just won’t happen because the country was populated at its early stages by the cast-offs of Europe, folks who were so dumb they couldn’t hack it in their homelands, and believed in religious hogwash so offensive that their fellow citizens wanted them gone.

Many of the essays here are way, way past their freshness date, full of names of minor novelists, critics, essayists, and politicians long forgotten. He will namedrop the contemporaries subject to his righteous ire, mostly those quacks and evangelists who are representative of a republic of poorly-educated, gullible imbeciles. Folks who shouldn’t even be allowed to vote. But, unfortunately, a lot of his essays seem completely pertinent to our republic in 2017, a time in which a sort of mindless populism has taken hold, rife with people who seem completely incapable of critical thinking. It’s as if Mencken, a pro-German Nietzschean nihilist, an elitist who fancies himself an Übermensch, has perfectly described America in the 21st century (“On Being an American”).

[S.D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Note:I've only read the first of the two volumes in this set, which includes the first three series of Mencken's Prejudices)

***review pending***

[Jonathon Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took a score of years to read.