H.L. Mencken

The factory made cigars and his father owned it, and Mencken spent three years inside it, hating the selling most of all. He had finished Baltimore Polytechnic as valedictorian in June 1896, at 15. His entire further education was one writing class at Cosmopolitan University in early 1898. In February 1899 the Baltimore Morning Herald took him on part-time, and by June he was a full-time reporter, 18 years old, in a city he never really left. He gave the Herald six years. When the paper was carved up and sold off in 1906 he crossed to the Baltimore Sun, where he stayed, on and off, for the next 42.

The Sun editorials built the reputation and the magazines carried it national: literary critic at The Smart Set from 1908, then The American Mercury, which he founded with George Jean Nathan in 1924 and edited until 1933. He wrote against representative democracy as a system in which lesser men rule better ones, against fundamentalism, and against what he called the booboisie. In the summer of 1925 he went to Dayton, Tennessee, named the Scopes case the Monkey Trial, and spent it mocking William Jennings Bryan. In 1926 he arranged his own arrest in Boston for selling a banned issue of his own magazine. In 1931 the Arkansas legislature voted to pray for his soul after he called the state the apex of moronia. The scholarship was real too: The American Language ran to a 1919 first edition and two supplements.

The diary he left for posthumous publication appeared in 1989 and shocked the sympathetic scholar who edited it, Charles Fecher, who found racial slurs and antisemitic passages throughout. Introducing Nietzsche in 1918, Mencken wrote that the case against the Jews was long and damning and would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as the world then had. The same man testified before Congress in 1935 for a federal anti-lynching bill, advised Walter White of the NAACP on how to get it passed, and in January 1939 argued for admitting every German Jew to the United States at once. He opposed entering both world wars and was still attacking the Allied effort in 1944. Fecher called him racist. Larry Gibson calls him an elitist. Marion Rodgers points to his contempt for what he called the Aryan imbecilities of Hitler.

A stroke on November 23, 1948, took the words. He stayed fully conscious, could barely read or write, spoke with difficulty, listened to classical music, and sometimes referred to himself in the past tense. William Manchester read aloud to him daily in the last year. He died in his sleep on January 29, 1956, and was buried at Loudon Park in Baltimore after the smallest possible service, which is what he had asked for. Inherit the Wind put him on stage as a sneering atheist reporter. The rowhouse on Hollins Street is a museum, his papers fill a room named for him at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the diary keeps the argument about him from settling.

H.L. Mencken's life against the full span of the corpus.

• In Defense of Women book
  His argument that women were the more rational sex 1918
• The American Language book
  His study of how American English broke from British English, with two later supplements 1919
• Prejudices book
  Six series between 1919 and 1927 1919
• The American Mercury company
  Founded with George Jean Nathan and published by Alfred A. Knopf 1924
• Scopes trial dispatches article
  The columns that named it the Monkey Trial, syndicated from the Baltimore Sun 1925
• Notes on Democracy book
  His case that democracy lets inferior men rule their superiors 1926

• June 1896 aged 15 Graduates from Baltimore Polytechnic as valedictorian at 15 He then worked three years in his father's cigar factory.
• February 1899 aged 18 Hired part-time by the Baltimore Morning Herald Full-time by June, at 18.
• 1906 aged ~26 Moves to The Baltimore Sun after the Herald is sold off
• 1919 aged ~39 Publishes The American Language
• 1924 aged ~44 Founds The American Mercury with George Jean Nathan He edited it until 1933.
• 1925 aged ~45 Covers the Scopes trial at Dayton and calls it the Monkey Trial
• August 27, 1930 aged 49 Marries Sara Haardt after a seven-year courtship She was 18 years younger, an Alabama novelist and a suffrage campaigner. She died of meningitis in 1935.
• November 23, 1948 aged 68 A stroke leaves him conscious but almost unable to read or write He never wrote for the Sun again.
• January 29, 1956 aged 75 Dies in his sleep in Baltimore

• William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925
  Three-time Democratic nominee and orator who made monetary reform, popular democracy, and moral politics central national issues. mocked at Dayton
• Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism. championed in print
• F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940
  Novelist who captured the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby, the defining novel of the American Dream. published early
• Walter Lippmann 1889–1974
  Columnist and political thinker whose work shaped modern journalism and debate over public opinion and democracy. rival diagnostician of democracy
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. attacked relentlessly
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. read and acted on