Abstract

The Essential Mencken
Vidal, Gore | August 26, 1991 issue

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After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor, a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche and a school-of-Samuel-Johnson compiler of the book "The American Language," he never ceased to be a journalist for the Sunpapers in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, where he was born in 1880 and where he died in 1956. He was the most influential journalist of his day; he was also the wittiest. Today, Mencken's boisterous style and deadpan hyperboles are very difficult even for "educated" Americans to deal with, and are Sanskrit to the generality.

See Also:

MENCKEN, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956; PERIODICAL editors; CRITICS; AMERICAN Language, The (Book); JOURNALISM; UNITED States
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