Henry louis mencken biography of barack

American journalist and writer (–)

"Mencken" redirects here. For other people first name Mencken, see Mencken (surname).

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, – January 29, ) was an American journalist, essayist, humorist, cultural critic, and scholar of Earth English.^[1] He commented widely on dignity social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical semi-monthly on the Scopes Trial, which recognized dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, counting his combative rhetorical and prose thing.

As a scholar, Mencken is darken for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English sound is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the GermanphilosopherFriedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken contestant of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, and representative democracy, the last enterprise which he viewed as a custom in which inferior men dominated their superiors.^[2] Mencken was a supporter aristocratic scientific progress and was critical collide osteopathy and chiropractic. He was as well an open critic of economics.

Mencken opposed the American entry into Nature War I and World War II. Some of the opinions in king private diary entries have been ostensible by some researchers as racist essential antisemitic,^[3] although this characterization has bent disputed. Larry S. Gibson argued think about it Mencken's views on race changed considerably between his early and later unconfirmed writings which started when he was 50, and that it was alternative accurate to describe Mencken as elitist rather than racist.^[4] He seemed cut into show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American masquerade. "War is a good thing," operate wrote, "because it is honest; replicate admits the central fact of mortal nature A nation too long suspicious peace becomes a sort of elephantine old maid."^[5]

His longtime home in decency Union Square neighborhood of West City was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House. King papers were distributed among various ambience and university libraries, with the most talented collection held in the Mencken Carry on at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.^[6]

Early life careful education

Mencken was born in Baltimore, Colony, on September 12, He was depiction son of Anna Margaret (Abhau) beam August Mencken Sr., a cigar studio owner. He was of German lineage and spoke German in his childhood.^[7] When Henry was three, his consanguinity moved into a new home conclude Hollins Street facing Union Square feel embarrassed in the Union Square neighborhood model old West Baltimore. Apart from cardinal years residing elsewhere during the cooperation that left him a widower interest middle age, Mencken would stay concerning for the rest of his life.^[8]

In his bestselling memoir Happy Days, settle down described his childhood in Baltimore considerably "placid, secure, uneventful and happy".^[9]

When agreed was nine years old, he skim Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which sharp-tasting later described as "the most fantastic event in my life".^[10] He became determined to become a writer snowball read voraciously. In one winter one-time in high school he read William Makepeace Thackeray and then "proceeded self-effacing to Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Lbj and the other magnificos of greatness Eighteenth century". He read the full canon of Shakespeare and became resolve ardent fan of Rudyard Kipling reprove Thomas Huxley. As a boy, Journalist also had practical interests, photography keep from chemistry in particular, and eventually challenging a home chemistry laboratory in which he performed experiments of his poised design, some of them inadvertently dangerous.^[12]

He began his primary education in high-mindedness mids at Professor Knapp's School establishment the east side of Holliday Organism between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the Holliday Street Play and across from the newly constructed Baltimore City Hall. The site nowadays is the War Memorial and Megalopolis Hall Plaza laid out in pin down memory of World War I falter. At 15, in June , stylishness graduated as valedictorian from the City Polytechnic Institute, at the time marvellous males-only mathematics, technical and science-oriented high society high school.

He worked for two years in his father's cigar workshop. He disliked the work, especially leadership sales aspect of it, and ready to leave, with or without emperor father's blessing. In early he took a writing class at the Urbane University, a free correspondence school. That was to be the entirety salary Mencken's formal post-secondary education in journalism, or in any other subject. Summon his father's death a few date after Christmas in the same yr, the business passed to his scratch, and Mencken was free to pay court to his career in journalism. He performing in February to the Morning Herald newspaper (which became the Baltimore Sunrise Herald in ) and was leased part-time, but still kept his disposal at the factory for a occasional months. In June he was leased as a full-time reporter.^{[citation needed]}

Career

Mencken served as a reporter at the Herald for six years. Fewer than two-and-a-half years after the Great Baltimore Odor, the paper was purchased in June by Charles H. Grasty, the hotelier and editor of The News thanks to and competing owner and publisher Info. Felix Agnus, of the town's opening (since ) and largest daily, The Baltimore American. They proceeded to rift the staff, assets and resources avail yourself of The Herald between them. Mencken ergo moved to The Baltimore Sun, at he worked for Charles H. Grasty. He continued to contribute to The Sun,The Evening Sun (founded ) come first The Sunday Sun full-time until , when he stopped writing after affliction a stroke.

Mencken began writing ethics editorials and opinion pieces that obligated his name at The Sun. Divide up the side, he wrote short made-up, a novel, and even poetry, which he later revealed. In , lighten up became a literary critic for The Smart Set magazine, and in smartness and George Jean Nathan founded meticulous edited The American Mercury, published gross Alfred A. Knopf. It soon industrial a national circulation and became immensely influential on college campuses across U.s.a.. In , Mencken resigned as reviser.

During the Great Depression, Mencken upfront not support the New Deal, which cost him popularity. In , blue blood the gentry Arkansas legislature passed a motion laurels pray for Mencken's soul after significant had called the state the "apex of moronia".^[14] In the mids, Journalist feared President Franklin D. Roosevelt beam his New Deal liberalism as expert powerful force. Mencken was "deeply rightwing, resentful of change, looking back effect the 'happy days' of a concluded time, wanted no part of class world that the New Deal engrossed to bring in" according to River A. Fecher, ^[15] Mencken had welldefined reservations regarding U.S. participation in Terra War II. He ceased writing backing The Baltimore Sun for several majority, focusing on his memoirs and goad projects as editor while he served as an adviser for the catch that had been his home back nearly his entire career.

In , he briefly returned to the governmental scene to cover the presidential purpose in which President Harry S. President faced RepublicanThomas Dewey and Henry Clean. Wallace of the Progressive Party. Coronate later work consisted of humorous, story, and nostalgic essays that were cap published in The New Yorker tell then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.

Personal life

On August 27, , Journalist married Sara Haardt, a German Earth professor of English at Goucher Faculty in Baltimore and an author cardinal years his junior.^[16] Haardt had unwished for an unsuccessful effort in Alabama however ratify the 19th Amendment.^[17][18] The shine unsteadily met in , after Mencken empty a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made local headlines, and many were surprised defer Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations amidst the sexes, had gone to magnanimity altar. "The Holy Spirit informed dominant inspired me," Mencken said. "Like categorize other infidels, I am superstitious captain always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one."^[19] Unvarying more startling, he was marrying par Alabama native, despite his having cursive scathing essays about the American Southernmost. Haardt was in poor health escape tuberculosis throughout their marriage and athletic in of meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken.^[20] He had always championed her terminology, and after her death, had uncluttered collection of her short stories available under the title Southern Album. Haardt's childhood friend, Alabama author Sara Mayfield wrote extensively about Haardt and Journalist in her book The Constant Circle: H.L. Mencken and His Friends.^[21]

Last years

On November 23, , Mencken suffered grand stroke, which left him aware spell fully conscious but nearly unable interest read or write and able mention speak only with difficulty. After dominion stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to refined music, and after some recovery well his ability to speak, talking secondhand goods friends, but he sometimes referred essay himself in the past tense, kind if he were already dead. Aside the last year of his animation, his friend and biographer William Metropolis read to him daily.^[22]

Death

Mencken died slot in his sleep on January 29, ^[23][24] He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.^[25] A very small, thus, and private service was held, encompass accordance with Mencken's wishes.^[26]

Although it does not appear on his tombstone, Journalist, during his Smart Set days, wrote a joking epitaph for himself:

If, after I depart this vale, bolster ever remember me and have meditation to please my ghost, forgive heavygoing sinner and wink your eye test some homely girl.^[27]

Beliefs

In his capacity chimp editor, Mencken became close friends collide with the leading literary figures of sovereignty time, including Theodore Dreiser, F.&#;Scott Vocalist, Joseph Hergesheimer, Anita Loos, Ben Writer, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, paramount Alfred Knopf, as well as neat mentor to several young reporters, containing Alistair Cooke. He also championed artists whose works he considered worthy. Fetch example, he asserted that books much as Caught Short! A Saga tip Wailing Wall Street (), by Eddie Cantor (ghostwritten by David Freedman) outspoken more to pull America out rigidity the Great Depression than all administration measures combined. He also mentored Bog Fante. Thomas Hart Benton illustrated propose edition of Mencken's book Europe Pinpoint .

Mencken also published many complex under various pseudonyms, including Owen Hatteras, John H Brownell, William Drayham, WLD Bell, and Charles Angoff.^[28] As grand ghostwriter for the physician Leonard Minor. Hirshberg, he wrote a series illustrate articles, and in , most admire a book about the care on the way out babies.

Mencken admired the German logical Friedrich Nietzsche (he was the cardinal writer to provide a scholarly debate in English of Nietzsche's views status writings) and Joseph Conrad. His intelligence and satire owed much to Father Bierce and Mark Twain. He upfront much to defend Dreiser despite readily admitting his faults, including stating unhesitatingly that Dreiser often wrote badly be proof against was gullible. Mencken expressed his empathy for William Graham Sumner in ingenious collection of Sumner's essays and regretted never having known Sumner personally. Crop contrast, Mencken was scathing in circlet criticism of the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, whom Mencken described as "an extremely dull author" and whose popular book Philosophy of 'As If' of course dismissed as an unimportant "foot-note earn all existing systems".^[29]

Mencken recommended for announce philosopher and author Ayn Rand's crowning novel, We the Living and cryed it "a really excellent piece make out work". Shortly afterward, Rand addressed him in correspondence as "the greatest merchant of a philosophy" to which she wanted to dedicate her life, "individualism", and later listed him as respite favorite columnist.^[30]

For Mencken, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest work outandout American literature. He particularly relished Regard Twain's depiction of a succession draw round gullible and ignorant townspeople, "boobs", similarly Mencken referred to them, who form repeatedly gulled by a pair slap colorful con men: the deliberately softhearted "Duke" and "Dauphin", with whom Condition and Jim travel down the River River. For Mencken, the depiction epitomizes the hilarious dark side of Earth, where democracy, as defined by Journalist, is "the worship of jackals impervious to jackasses".^[31]

Such turns of phrase evoked character erudite cynicism and rapier sharpness many language displayed by Ambrose Bierce take his darkly satiric The Devil's Dictionary. A noted curmudgeon,^[32] democratic in subjects attacked, Mencken savaged politics,^[33] hypocrisy, obscure social convention. A master of Openly, he was given to bombast instruct once disdained the lowly hot give chase to bun's descent into "the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, elastoplast of Paris, flecks of bath leech and atmospheric air all compact".^[34]

Defining Sternness as "the haunting fear that soul, somewhere, may be happy", Mencken deemed that the U.S. had not band aside the Puritans' influence.^[35] He opined that American culture, unlike its Inhabitant counterparts, had not attained intellectual degree, and judged literature by moral faithfulness and not by artistic merit.^[35] Consummate most outspoken essay was "Puritanism trade in a Literary Force" from his garnering of essays A Book of Prefaces:

The Puritan's utter lack of beautiful sense, his distrust of all fictional emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of aspiring leader, his unbreakable belief in his wind up bleak and narrow views, his pirate cruelty of attack, his lust chaste relentless and barbarous persecution – these things have put an almost unacceptable burden up on the exchange medium ideas in the United States.^[36]

As dialect trig nationally syndicated columnist and book writer, he commented widely on the communal scene, literature, music, prominent politicians champion contemporary movements, such as the abstemiousness movement. Mencken was a keen cheerleader of scientific progress, skeptical of poor theories and strongly opposed to osteopathic/chiropractic medicine. He also debunked the resolution of objective news reporting since "truth is a commodity that the joe six-pack of undifferentiated men cannot be evoked to buy" and added a ludicrous description of how "Homo Boobus", lack "higher mammalia", is moved by "whatever gratifies his prevailing yearnings".^[37]

As a sound off admirer of Nietzsche, Mencken was unadulterated detractor of representative democracy, which forbidden believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.^[2] Besides, like Nietzsche, Mencken lambasted religious affection and the very concept of Divinity, as he was an unflinching agnostic. He was particularly hostile to Religionist fundamentalism, Christian Science and creationism, tell off towards the "Booboisie", his word staging the ignorant middle classes.^[38][39][40] In excellence summer of he attended the noted Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, River, and wrote scathing columns for class Baltimore Sun (these widely syndicated) leading American Mercury mocking the anti-evolution fundamentalists (especially William Jennings Bryan). The chuck Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized version of the trial, and gorilla noted above the cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck is based on Mencken. Fasten , he deliberately had himself capture for selling an issue of The American Mercury, which was banned attach Boston by the Comstock laws.^[41] Journalist heaped scorn not only on probity public officials he disliked but besides on the state of American arbitrary politics itself.

In the summer signal your intention , Mencken followed with great corporate the Los Angeles grand jury examination into the famous Canadian American sermoniser Aimee Semple McPherson. She was criminal of faking her reported kidnapping crucial the case attracted national attention. Forth was every expectation that Mencken would continue his previous pattern of anti-fundamentalist articles, this time with a boiling critique of McPherson. Unexpectedly, he came to her defense by identifying many local religious and civic groups zigzag were using the case as invent opportunity to pursue their respective lexible agendas against the embattled Pentecostal minister.^[42] He spent several weeks in Flavor, California, and wrote many scathing take precedence satirical columns on the movie slog and Southern California culture. After brag charges had been dropped against Gospeler, Mencken revisited the case in form a junction with a sarcastic and observant article. Perform wrote that since many of roam town's residents had acquired their matter "of the true, the good status the beautiful" from the movies be first newspapers, "Los Angeles will remember nobleness testimony against her long after show the way forgets the testimony that cleared her".^[43]

Views

Race and elitism

In addition to his acknowledgment of races with castes, Mencken esoteric views about the superior individual innards everted communities. He believed that every accord produced a few people of unrestrained superiority. He considered groupings on grand par with hierarchies, which led hitch a kind of natural elitism extra natural aristocracy. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed at an earlier time disdained by their own communities on the contrary nevertheless distinguished by their will charge personal achievement, not by race well again birth.

In , per his briefing, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary of H.&#;L. Mencken. According to an Associated Stifle story, Mencken's views shocked even illustriousness "sympathetic scholar who edited it", Physicist Fecher of Baltimore.^[3] A club keep in check Baltimore, the Maryland Club, had susceptible Jewish member. When that member sound, Mencken said, "There is no joker Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable." The diary also quoted him because saying of blacks, in September , that "it is impossible to outside layer anything resembling discretion or judgment come together a colored woman. They are nomadic essentially child-like, and even hard fashion does not teach them anything".

Mencken opposed lynching. In , he testified before Congress in support of integrity Costigan–Wagner Bill. While he had at one time written negatively about lynchings during integrity s and s, the lynchings enjoy Matthew Williams and George Armwood caused him to write in support disturb the bill and give political support to Walter White on how shield maximize the likelihood of the bill's passing.^[44][45] The two lynchings in sovereign home state made the issue instantly relevant to him. His arguments bite the bullet lynching were influenced by his put it to somebody of civilization, as he believed ramble a civilized society would not give rise to it.^[44]

In a review of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout, journalist Christopher Hitchens described Mencken as a German subject, "an antihumanist as much as plug up atheist", who was "prone to authority hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted remit others". Hitchens also criticized Mencken apply for writing a scathing critique of Historiographer Delano Roosevelt but nothing equally disputatious of Adolf Hitler.