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About the Author

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 show more 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) show less

Series

Works by H. L. Mencken

The Vintage Mencken (1955) — Author — 672 copies
In Defense of Women (1918) 390 copies
Prejudices: A Selection (1958) 270 copies
Treatise on the Gods (1930) 208 copies
The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989) 160 copies
Notes on Democracy (2007) 144 copies
My Life As Author And Editor (1993) 137 copies
The Impossible H. L. Mencken (1991) — Author — 129 copies
The American Scene: A Reader (1965) 115 copies
Minority Report (1955) 96 copies
A Carnival of Buncombe (1956) 88 copies
A Choice of Days (1980) 88 copies
The Days of H.L. Mencken (1947) 81 copies
Newspaper Days: 1899-1906 (1758) 76 copies
H.L. Mencken on Religion (2002) 75 copies
Happy Days: 1880-1892 (1940) 68 copies
Heathen Days: 1890-1936 (1601) 58 copies
Prejudices: first series (1923) 47 copies
Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918) 44 copies
A Book of Prefaces (1917) 41 copies
A Book of Burlesques (1916) 33 copies
Mencken's America (2004) 28 copies
Selected Prejudices (1926) 27 copies
Letters of H.L. Mencken (1961) 27 copies
Christmas Story (1946) 22 copies
H.L. Mencken on Music (1961) 22 copies
Livro Dos Insultos, O (2000) 22 copies
The New Mencken Letters (1977) 21 copies
Prejudices: Third Series (1922) 17 copies
Prejudices: Second Series (1924) 16 copies
Friedrich Nietzsche (1993) 14 copies
Europe After 8:15 (1914) — Co-author — 14 copies
The Antichrist 12 copies
Prejudices: sixth series (1927) 11 copies
Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934) 11 copies
Prejudices: Fourth Series (1925) 9 copies
Americana (1925) 8 copies
The Gist of Nietzche. (1910) 8 copies
James Branch Cabell (2011) 6 copies
Prejudices: Fifth Series (1926) 5 copies
American Mercury: Facsimile Edition of Volume I (1984) — Editor — 4 copies
A Little Book in C Major (2006) 4 copies
Pistols for Two (2010) 3 copies
Partis pris (2016) 3 copies
Americana 1926 (1926) 3 copies
Ship Ahoy — Contributor — 3 copies
Americana 1926 (1926) 2 copies
Gesammelte Vorurteile (2000) 2 copies
Mencken's Americana (2002) 2 copies
Making a President (1932) 2 copies
Supplement 1 copy
Book of Burlesques (1923) 1 copy
Seven Books (2015) 1 copy
Collected Poems (2009) 1 copy

Associated Works

An American Tragedy (1925) — Introduction, some editions — 3,980 copies
The Art of the Personal Essay (1994) — Contributor — 1,371 copies
50 Great Short Stories (1952) — Contributor — 1,242 copies
The Best American Essays of the Century (2000) — Contributor — 774 copies
The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (2000) — Contributor, some editions — 550 copies
Russell Baker's Book of American Humor (1993) — Contributor — 207 copies
Literary history of the United States (1946) — Contributor — 190 copies
This Is My Best (1942) — Contributor — 186 copies
Atheism: A Reader (2000) — Contributor — 181 copies
The Norton Book of Personal Essays (1997) — Contributor — 142 copies
The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1997) — Contributor — 98 copies
The Line of Love : Dizain des Mariages (1905) — Introduction, some editions — 84 copies
Tales of Mean Streets (1894) — Preface, some editions — 67 copies
Desert Island Decameron (1945) — Contributor — 57 copies
The Bedside Tales: A Gay Collection (1945) — Contributor — 45 copies
The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence (1922) — Introduction, some editions — 41 copies
Great Tales of Terror (2002) — Contributor — 39 copies
A Quarto of Modern Literature (1935) — Contributor — 39 copies
The World of Law, Volume II : The Law as Literature (1960) — Contributor — 21 copies
A Round-Table in Poictesme: A Symposium (1924) — Contributor — 21 copies
The Best in the World (1973) — Contributor — 13 copies
William Jennings Bryan and the campaign of 1896 (1953) — Contributor — 13 copies
British and American Essays, 1905-1956 (1959) — Contributor — 7 copies
Time to Be Young: Great Stories of the Growing Years (1945) — Contributor — 7 copies
The bear went over the mountain (1964) — Contributor — 6 copies
The Fireside Treasury of Modern Humor (1963) — Contributor — 5 copies
The Bathroom Reader (1946) — Contributor — 3 copies
Alfred A. Knopf - quarter century 1915-1940 (1940) — Contributor — 3 copies
American Aphrodite (Volume Four, Number Sixteen) (1955) — Contributor — 2 copies
Eyes of Boyhood (1953) — Contributor — 2 copies
Wings, Vol. 6, No. 2, February 1932 — Contributor — 1 copy
The Avon Annual: 18 Great Story of Today (1944) — Contributor — 1 copy
Essays by James Huneker — Editor — 1 copy

Tagged

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Reviews

I read the 1936 4th edition, last reprinted in 1974. I note that the price in pencil is marked down to $5.98 and my address is written in it from 1977, so I bought it used. The book has been on various shelves in four states since then. It took a Coronavirus pandemic to get me to look at it, and I ended up reading it through. If you’re interested in the difference between English in England vs the US, in the history of the development of American English, in the origin of American surnames, in American place names, in American slang, or in the historical development of any of these things, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t enjoy this detailed work.

If you are of a sensitive nature, you might be offended by Mencken’s well-known bigotry, but he does not display it openly here. It is just occasionally slightly exposed. You might not even notice it unless you are an American of non-English ancestry.

Of some interest were:
Mencken explains the difference between the meaning of the expression to jew someone in the US and England on p. 124 (Who knew?).

There is a list of Americanisms that derive from commercial products. Some are surprising and some that anyone would have known in 1936 have disappeared, e.g. uneeda.

There is a list of common short words that were selected and used by newspaper editors for their headlines that sometimes popularized the word, e.g.

Ace. In the sense of expert or champion it came in during the World War. It has since been extended to mean any person who shows any ponderable proficiency in whatever he undertakes to do…
Blast. It has quite displaced explosion in headlines…
Car. It is rapidly displacing all the older synonyms for automobile, including even auto….


He discusses the creation of American verbs in various ways, e.g. to phone … to tiptoe (for to walk tiptoe) … to reminisce … to orate … to author, and others using -ize and a proper name which are now almost lost to us, e.g. to hooverize (introduced in 1917 and included in Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1934) and to oslerize appearing after a famous oration by Dr. William Osler in 1905.

Along with other true or pseudo-abbreviations Mencken mentions the American expression O.K., which he comments was already used internationally in 1936, and he discusses its various false origin histories.

There is an extensive discussion of the differences between American and English school terminology that I found useful since I never understand what it means if a character in a novel is in their third standard, or what the differences are among an usher, a master, a pro-chancellor, or a high steward.

Various American vs English euphemisms are mentioned including nerts that I mostly see in old comic strips, but was apparently very widely used in 1936. He mentions some odd euphemisms that have been used in newspapers where gonorrhea, syphilis, venereal, and even virgin were prohibited. In 1933 the new treatment of giving a patient malaria to treat tertiary syphilis was invented (the fever is beneficial; the inventor won the Nobel prize in Medicine). The New York Times spoke of it only as a dread form of insanity caused by a blood disease. Mencken tells us that in Appalachia and the Ozarks certain common words were avoided in every-day speech regardless of context. Examples include bed, tail and leg!

There is an interesting discussion of various expletives and the history of their development, e.g. hell and, in England, bloody.

In a fantastic discovery (!), I learned that the word insignia is, in Latin, the plural of insigne, and that it was formerly considered inappropriate to use insignia as a singular noun, much as some decry data or criteria as a singular.
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markm2315 | 1 other review | Jul 1, 2023 |
I have read this book off and on for a decade i suppose. A topical selection of his newspaper columns- arranged by Presidents, food, music, Scopes trial, Baltimore miscellany and so forth. Consistently great, if cranky reading. Has great charm in the 1st draft of history way - that is about Harding and Coolidge and Hoover and Roosevelt before they had established their reputation (none of that inevitability of history that retrospective history books necessarily use). Cranky, but light hearted - he often strikes me as a man who is paid for his opinion and even if he doesn't have a strong opinion will devolve on one - immediately - to serve his purpose (the writing of the article). Fair enough. Great writer- one wonders how he was so popular when he is insulting his readers almost constantly. I know we all see ourselves as part of the rarefied group - with Mencken, of course- who see through bunk and rise above the rabble he so disparages.… (more)
 
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apende | Jul 12, 2022 |
 
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