Mencken, H. L. (1880–1956)

Henry Louis Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, was an extraordinarily influential, controversial, and prominent critic whose authority reached its height on the American scene in the 1920s. More than simply a literary or social commentator, Mencken occupied a roster of distinct roles; the critic Alfred Kazin said of his range of specialties, that if Mencken had never lived, it would have taken a whole army of assorted [Page 938]philosophers, monologists, editors, and patrons of the new writing to make up for him. Rising through the ranks of journalism from humble beginnings as a news-boy, Mencken developed a provocative prose style and used it to lampoon the hypocrisies that populated the American landscape. He brandished his noisy and sharp pen to denounce Victorians as “Puritans,” lambaste the sentimentality of the American South, attack the fundamentalism of the Bible Belt, and issue salvos against the American bourgeois, whom he dubbed the “booboisie.” One biographer noted of Mencken's opponents that he was against the American Legion as much as he was against the communists. He was against the communists as much as they were against the Republicans.

Rather than hiding behind pure vitriol, however, Mencken championed such authors as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and James Branch Cabell. He published early volumes on Friedrich Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw and encouraged a native outgrowth of literature—helping to spur a literary renaissance—in the South by offering himself as a mentor to writers. In 1914, Mencken became an editor of the literary magazine Smart Set, and in 1924 he founded the American Mercury, a monthly journal of essays, fiction, and poetry that located its audience among the “civilized minority.” As an editor, he sought out work by African Americans and women. His personal commitment to intellectual freedom took him from the sidelines of the Scopes Trial to the judge's bench in the Hatrack Trial, where he risked a prison sentence to protest the banning of the American Mercury in Boston. In his later years, after receding from the forefront of American criticism, and before his debilitating stroke in 1948, Mencken endeared himself to the American public through the release of his Days autobiographies and completed work on a significant philological study, The American Language.

While Mencken's political views tended toward libertarianism, he mixed an anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic stance with elitist tendencies. The early distrust that Mencken felt for democratic government was hardened by his experience of World War I, when he encountered prejudice as an American of German descent and witnessed the crackdown on civil liberties in America. Mencken identified democracy as a threat to freedom—especially artistic freedom—and he saw the press as an outlet to protest against censorship and ensure freedom and discourse. On occasion, however, Mencken was doggedly resistant to acknowledging unpleasant truths: Immersed in Baltimore's German-American culture, Mencken lost his relevance as a commentator by clinging stubbornly to pro-German sentiments as the reality of Hitler's atrocities swept America during World War II. Throughout his career, though, Mencken used the power of the pen to voice political and social dissent, attack American complacency, and champion marginalized writers.

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