Happy Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1880-1892 (Volume 1)

H. L. Mencken's Autobiography #1

by H.L. Mencken

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection , newly packaged editions of nine Mencken Happy Days , Heathen Days , Newspaper Day s, Prejudices , Treatise on the Gods , On Politics , Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work , Minority Report , and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy . With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection , newly packaged editions of nine Mencken Happy Days , Heathen Days , Newspaper Day s, Prejudices , Treatise on the Gods , On Politics , Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work , Minority Report , and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy . Most of these autobiographical writings first appeared in the New Yorker . Here Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Journalism, History, American

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1940

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

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reading.

A man who knew what words meant describing scenes of his happy and prosperous childhood. Told with wit and ironic nostalgia, but most of all told with unblinking honesty.

Fair Warning: What will appall those who have not dipped before into the rich stream of benevolent racism that essentially defines American Letters from the Colonial Period straight through to the Civil Rights Era, is how casually offensive racial and ethic tags are dropped into a story, sprinkled in by the author like a cook adds salt to a dish. Mencken was no saint, he was solidly a man of the South writing to people who thought as he did and that populace was not going to gag on an offensive slang reference to a man's color, indeed most humor in the 1920s REQUIRED offensive racial caricatures. I refuse to defend Mencken on this point, and not just because I don't believe he would want me to. Cynical humanism is woven tightly throughout Mencken's worldview, and for a man so contemptuous of the Booboisee and their utter lack of self awareness this blind spot of his that allows him to denigrate the powerless can be extremely jarring. It probably has a lot to do with why he is almost ignored today as a man of letters. I will not defend Mencken, but if there is any small grace to his approach to writing that might allow us to forgive him his slurs, it is that like in early Twain, he was an equal opportunity slanderer who loved and despised all humanity greatly and in equal measures. Unlike Twain, however, Mencken never grew past the habit of seeing the other. I have read too much literature from this period to continue to be shocked by the habits of a writer who died before casual racism became taboo.

So I like the book despite this massive flaw, not because of it.

[Thorne Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty remarkable book, particularly because it is presented as nothing more than a rambling recollection loosely arranged into topical groupings. Like most memoirs written by white men before, say, the eighteen- or nineteen-nineties, it is replete with jaw-dropping statements about race and other races (in the form of both the expected prejudices, as well as one or two intimations of a jarring broad-mindedness). This made the book difficult to appreciate objectively, and generally added to the feeling that while a first-class writer, H.L. Mencken would probably be an insupportable bore if you were to be stuck in an elevator with his resurrected soul. That, and he is clearly a blowhard. But a self-aware one with a well-developed sense of humor, philosophy, and psychology to make him very enjoyable company when you -- as the reader -- get to dictate the length of your encounters.

[JimC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Mencken unfiltered.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first installment of what became his Days trilogy, Happy Days is Mencken’s memoir of his childhood in Baltimore during the 1880s and 90s. If you know Mencken from his journalism, you’ll expect explosive prose and robust misanthropy, but you’ll only find the former here. This is indeed a happier Mencken, but really it’s no loss to the reader. This book must be, I think, one of the great American autobiographies. It’s hugely fun. It should be noted that the book contains a great deal of casual racism that will offend our present sensibilities. Nonetheless, for its prose, its comic qualities, and as a window into the good and the bad of American life in the late nineteenth-century, Happy Days is worth the time.

[Nick Willner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this knowing next to nothing about Mencken, i still feel you’ll learn more about him through his work as a journalist. This book was more of a study of the minutia of daily life and characters in Baltimore in the time period (1880-1889). The thing that makes this book so interesting is also the thing that makes it dull at times. He takes you there to the smallest details about what life was like for a child at the time-school teachers, children’s games, family vacations to the “country” (Ellicott City), music lessons, the local candy shops and merchants, etc. The problem is sometimes life is boring. You really get a great feel for the era though-great read for anyone interested in what city life was like in the late 1800’s or anyone interested in Baltimore/Maryland history.

[Glenn Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazing book about the life and times of HL Mencken in Baltimore during the 1880's. Aspects of life and living that we do not know of or think of nowadays- no phones, no tv, no automobiles...no texting, tweeting....back when kids played outside until dark-games that I had heard of and forgotten about it-leap frog, for instance. He shared many stories of adults in the neighborhood who had served in the Civil War-Whites and 'Afriamericans.' He shared stories of taking the train to visit Washington, DC, which was one of the first cities with pavement-white pavement, which was too bright in the summer to be around.

[Sukriti · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Happy Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1880-1892" is a captivating glimpse into the early life of H.L. Mencken. This first volume of his memoirs, part of the Bumcombe Collection, covers his childhood and teenage years. Mencken's writing is both witty and reflective, offering a rich portrayal of late 19th-century America. His vivid descriptions and keen observations bring his experiences to life, from family dynamics to his budding interest in journalism. Readers will appreciate Mencken's sharp humor and candid storytelling, making this autobiography a delightful and insightful read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.49 stars. First of three volumes of his memoirs. This covers his childhood in Baltimore. Very funny and lots of interesting information about life in the 19th Century.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mencken's childhood memories are wonderful for two chief reasons: as excavations of the lost world of comfortable German-American Baltimoreans of the 1880s, and for the incredible vigor that HLM got into his prose.

HLM is, I think, more notable for his talent as a sentence-crafter than to any claims to wisdom, and we are treated to some beauties:
On his baby fat: "This adiposity passed off as I began to run about, and from the age of six onward I was rather skinny, but toward the end of my twenties my cross-section again became a circle, and at thirty I was taking one of the first anti-fat cures, and beating it by sly resorts to malt liquor."

On his father's (who owned a cigar factory) professional palaver: "They fell to talking of the illustrious personages they were constantly meeting in Washington - Senators who had not been sober for a generation, Congressmen who fought bartenders and kicked the windows out of night-hacks, Admirals in the Navy who were reputed to be four-, five- and even six-bottle men, Justices of the Supreme and other high courts who were said to live on whiskey and chewing tobacco alone."

These quotations capture the spirit of Happy Days - cynical and critical, but pleasantly entertained by the faults of the world. It's a deeply conservative mindset. HLM critiques not because he wishes to revise the world, but because there is so much entertainment in doing so. The pleasure in reading Happy Days is only alloyed by his treatment of blacks. While I wouldn't expect Mencken to be politically correct (or even generous), it is fair to expect him to have been as critical and clear-eyed towards racial stereotypes as he was towards most things. Afterall, Mencken did famously excoriate the Klan when it surged in the twenties. He was not a standard-issue bigot. Instead, Happy Days' frequent accounts of young HLM's black acquaintances do little to rise above pernicious southern tropes.

(I read this one in the Library of America's collection of HLM's memoires, which includes his appendecized revisions - "Days Revisisted." Days Revisited is probably only required for the completist who needs a list of every one of HLM's childhood neighbors and the history of their progeny, eg, but it is a useful account of which of HLM's relatives he believed were stupid, nincompoops, idiotic, etc.)

[Jay]

I felt little sympathy (if that's the word) for our narrator throughout. Or perhaps it was a lack of admiration. Still, the book felt complete, and I somewhat warmed to his character in the last 10 pages or so. Memoirs, or at least proper memoirs of the traditional style, are a bit of a mystery to me. I simply haven't read many (or any, that I recall) previously. And perhaps that is a fault of mine, not of Mencken's.

Regardless, it was a worthwhile book. If one can digest Mencken's race-related language (and his perspectives about all things in general) in the context of his era rather than in the context of our own, then one can perhaps get beyond a reflex of offense to instead get an inside view to the author's time, and of the Baltimore in particular of that time. In that way, the book offers something worthwhile. And besides, books and authors must be tried, just like foods. I won't likely taste this author again, but I'm still glad I tried it because whether or not I prefer a food (or author) or not does not change the fact that it's objectively interesting. Crap, what was I getting at...

[Robert Maier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished it and loved it. Not as densely written as Notes on Democracy, so an easier, lighter read. Can't wait to see what unfolds. I bought it used on line, and turned out to be a first edition. Unfortunately unsigned, but nice to hold it. It's in great condition for 73 years old. A dazzling portrait of Baltimore seen through a young boy's eyes at the end of the 19th century. Written like poetry.

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Believe it or not Mencken actually had a happy childhood, and he records it here. His humor is all there minus the biting criticism. His vocabulary is amazing (had to look up a lot of words) but the way he puts words together is so delightfully creative it caused me to smile or laugh at nearly every page. And it gives a very instructive picture of what growing up in nineteenth century Baltimore was like. Delightful read.

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely delightful first volume of Mencken's autobiography. A more caustic wit never appeared in the history of American journalism. This volume of the trilogy traces what can only be described as an idyllic childhood in late nineteenth century Baltimore. The pages turn themselves and the events and people are described with a love that even his world famous biting satire cannot hide. He is a curmudgeon's curmudgeon.

[Paul Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly warm and affectionate account of his childhood. Perhaps the most entertaining childhood memoir I've read.

[nobody · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a lot better then the Choice Of Days collection, which only has about a third of each of the Days books.

[Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming account of life as a child in 1880's Baltimore. Surprisingly warm, especially for the curmudgeonly Mencken.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great.