A second Mencken chrestomathy

Format:

Book

Title:

A second Mencken chrestomathy

Author:

Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956.

ISBN:

9780679428299

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

New York : A.A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1995.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 491 pages ; 22 cm

Contents:

The Commonwealth of Morons -- The Pushful American -- The Metaphysic of Rotary -- The Yokel -- Varieties of Envy -- The Immigration Problem -- Utopia in Little -- Bring On the Clowns -- The Politician Under Democracy -- The Joboisie -- The Men Who Rule Us -- Liberty and Democracy -- Leaves from a Note-book -- The True Immortal -- The Same Old Gang -- Reflections on Government -- The End of an Era -- The Suicide of Democracy -- The Last Ditch -- Liberalism -- The War Against War -- Summary Judgment -- The Next Round -- The Art of Selling War -- Onward, Christian Soldiers! -- War Without Art -- Memorials of Dishonor -- The Nature of Liberty -- The Beloved Turnkey -- Cops and Their Art -- Jack Ketch as Eugenist -- The Humanitarian Fallacy -- One Size Fits All -- More and Better Psychopaths -- The Arbuckle Case -- Stewards of Nonsense -- Over the Side -- The Judge -- The Genesis of a Deity -- Christian Origins -- The Root of Religion -- The Mask -- The Eternal Mob -- The IQ of holy church -- Literary Theologians -- The believing mind -- The road of doubt -- Veritas odium parit -- Brethren of the cloth -- Playing with fire -- Shock troops -- Story without a moral -- Divine virtuosity -- Man and superman -- The great illusion -- Ethical origins -- The flesh is weak -- The supreme curse -- Thrift -- The genealogy of etiquette -- At the mercy of the mob -- The goal -- The superman -- Heredity -- Happiness -- The horns of the dilemna -- Men and women -- The curse of man -- Le vice Anglais -- Sex on the stage -- Women as spectacles -- Venus at the domestic hearth -- Clubs -- Efficiency as charm -- Woman and the artist -- Martyrs -- Issue -- The burnt child -- On connubial bliss -- Divorce -- Cast a cold eye -- Progress -- Aubade -- Thomas Henry Huxley -- The eternal riddle -- Two benefactors of mankind -- Elegy -- Sketch maritime -- Penguin's eggs.

Summary:

This Wonderful Sequel to the best-selling A Mencken Chrestomathy of nearly half a century ago is full of the iconoclastic common sense that marked H.L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist." All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.

Subject(s):

American literature.

Genre:

American prose literature.

Added Author:

Teachout, Terry.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	818.52 Mencken 1995	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

This Wonderful Sequel to the best-selling A Mencken Chrestomathy of nearly half a century ago is full of the iconoclastic common sense that marked H. L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages", with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography", "The Commonwealth of Morons", "Le Vice Anglais", "Acres of Babble", "Hooch for the Artist". All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.

Author Notes

H. L. Mencken 1880-1956 H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 12, 1880. He considered Maryland to be his home despite his many years in New York. As a child he attended Professor Friedrich Knapp's Institute, a private school for children of German descent. He completed his secondary education at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, from which he graduated at the age of 16.

Mencken wanted to be a writer but was obligated to work in his father's cigar factory. When his father died suddenly in 1899, Mencken immediately sought a job at the Baltimore Herald. Through he began with no experience in journalism, he quickly learned every job at the newspaper and at age 25 became its editor.

Mencken went on to build himself a reputation as one of America's most brilliant writers and literary critics. His basic approach was to question everything and to accept no limits on personal freedom. He attacked organized religion, American cultural and literary standards, and every aspect of American life that he found shallow, ignorant, or false - which was almost everything. From the 1920's until his death, Mencken's sharp wit and penetrating social commentary made him one of the most highly regarded - and fiercely hated - of American social critics. He was later memorialized in the dramatic portrait of the cynical journalist in the play and film Inherit the Wind.

Shortly after World War I, Mencken began a project that was to fascinate him for the rest of his life: a study of American language and how it had evolved from British English. In 1919 he published The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. To this and his publisher's surprise, the book sold out quickly; its wit and nonscholarly approach attracted many readers who would not normally buy a book on such a subject. In 1936, a revised and enlarged edition was published, and in 1945 and 1948, supplements were added. The work shows not only how American English differs from British English but how the 300 year American experience shaped American dialect. Thus the book, still considered a classic in its field, is both a linguistic and social history of the United States.

Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956. He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

This book's precursor, A Mencken Chrestomathy (collection), was a bestseller in 1949; this anthology of 238 short excerpts from a range of works, selected and annotated by Mencken but unfinished, lay undisturbed in a Baltimore library until Teachout, an arts columnist for the New York Daily News, found it in 1992, while working on a Mencken biography. Teachout considers Mencken's work still immediate. Indeed, quotable lines abound: ``His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses,'' writes Mencken on ``the politician under democracy.'' Baltimore's bard can be magnificent and maddening in the same passage, damning American idiocies while disparaging immigrants. But what impresses most about this collection is Mencken's breadth; few contemporary writers would assume such a broad brief, writing not only about politics, law and the clergy but also about geography, literature, music and drink. To apply a Mencken sobriquet, he was no lesser eminento. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Review

Rescued from an abandoned but essentially finished manuscript, the second of Mencken's chrestomathies forms as good a compendium of social and literary irascibility as one could hope for. Mencken put together his first chrestomathy (from the Greek, ``useful learning'') to bring back his pungent but out-of-print writings from his Prejudices, the American Mercury, the Baltimore Sun, and the Smart Set. Although his philological The American Language had sustained his reputation after the Depression, the Chrestomathy's success inspired him to a sequel, which he had almost finished editing at the time of his crippling stroke. Teachout (City Limits, 1991, etc.) has retrieved the manuscript from Mencken's voluminous deposit of papers in Baltimore and, with a last boost of editorial care, perfected it into a mirror-image of the first volume, succeeding in preserving Mencken's character as well as his writing. With sections titled ``Americana,'' ``Progress,'' ``Constructive Criticism,'' and ``Lesser Eminentoes,'' this farrago is less coherent than most miscellanies; but that is likewise true of Mencken's supercharged polemical prose, whether he is attacking YMCA morality (``The Emperor of Wowsers''), the legal profession (``Stewards of Nonsense''), or New York City (``Totentanz''). A few of his better-known pieces appear here, such as his sardonic history of academic criticism, ``Criticism of Criticism of Criticism''; his attack on the later George Bernard Shaw, ``The Ulster Polonius''; and his gastric analysis of America, ``Hot Dogs.'' Throughout there are gems of cultural and literary criticism, even buffooneries like an anthropological satire of the discovery of fire. The only drawbacks to this anthology, aside from Mencken's lapses into offensive remarks (e.g., about nonAnglo Saxon immigrants) and bombastic opinionating, are the omissions of an author editing himself for posterity: Mencken includes no substantial excerpts of his political, philological, or autobiographical writings. Still, this has everything that puts Mencken alongside Ambrose Bierce and Edmund Wilson in the American tradition of intelligent ornery writing.

Booklist Review

Following My Life as Author and Editor (1993) and Fred Hobson's biography [BKL Mr 1 94], the Menckenian revival continues apace with this sparkling successor to the first chrestomathy, which was a best-seller in 1949. More than an anthology, the second volume represents pieces (some previously unpublished) that Mencken himself selected and revised before his stroke aborted the project; another proposal to publish came to nought in 1963. Over 60 percent of the 238 items, many from Mencken's magazines Smart Set and American Mercury, are not available elsewhere, which in itself makes the publication of this title something of a literary event. That it parades again the sage of Baltimore in his incisive, if often irksome, eloquence only confirms him as one of the better belletrists of the century. The job of discriminator of taste exists to be seized in any age, and in the teens and twenties, Mencken extolled and excoriated with idiosyncratic abandon. The books and music he reviewed have faded from memory, but his satirical exfoliations remain fresh, for example, in praise of a bartender's memoir of the bibulous arts or in contempt for a Rotarian's history of his organization. Edited by New York critic Terry Teachout, who is preparing his own biography of the provocateur, this entertaining, exasperating collection captures Mencken's gloomy view of human nature and his bright delight in stripping from it all cant and concealment. ~--Gilbert Taylor

Library Journal Review

Selected as a continuation of the original chrestomathy by the Baltimore iconoclast himself before his death, this logically organized sampling of his pre-Depression credos (mostly from The Smart Set and American Mercury) suggests why Mencken was to a whole generation of American youth not just a witty newspaperman with a dazzling style but a force gleefully battering America's deep-rooted Puritan inhibitions. An early champion of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser, Mencken ridiculed America's institutions, from Rotary Clubs to Harvard professors to the Senate. Sometimes wrongheaded in his judgments, he was unschooled but self-educated in music and politics. His views are sometimes racist and sexist, but they're seldom dull and-in an age of self-conscious "niceness"-never polite. Well worth dipping into.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.