Mencken Chrestomathy

Before there was any such thing as political correctness, H. L. Mencken was flouting it. He was also cheerfully deriding the precursors of family values and lambasting the guardians of public virtue. This historic new collection is further evidence that Mencken was our most astute, stylish, and biliously funny commentator on the eternal American quackeries. A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (a word meaning “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors”) was compiled by the sage of Baltimore before he suffered the stroke that ended his career and has only now been retrieved from his private papers by the columnist and Mencken biographer Terry Teachout. Its 238 selections—many of which have never before been published in book form—encompass subjects from Americana (“The Commonwealth of Morons”) to men and women (“Sex on the Stage”) and from criminology (“More and Better Psychopaths”) to the pursuit of happiness (“Alcohol”). The result is Mencken at his most engaging, maddening, heretical, and hilarious.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. Discovered among his private papers and edited by columnist Terry Teachout, this collection is full of the iconoclastic common sense that marked Mencken’s astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. This chrestomathy (“a collection of literary passages”) incorporates writings about a variety of subjects: politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, and the brethren of the cloth.

Controversial even before it was published in 1930, Treatise on the Gods collects Mencken's scathing commentary on religion.

Though best known for his caustic newspaper columns, H. L. Mencken's most enduring contribution to American literature may be his autobiographical writings, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker. In Happy Days, Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s and celebrates a way of life that he saw swiftly changing—from a time of straw hats and buggy rides to locomotives and bread lines.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. In 1956, Mencken read through his notebooks and extracted those pieces he thought truest, most pertinent, most precise, or most likely to blow the dust out of a reader's brain.

Edited and annotated by H.L.M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books—the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong—but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all. Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.

The perfect book for the 2012 elections. . . and beyond![Democracy] [i]is based on propositions that are palpably not true-and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true...[/i]H.L. Mencken wrote [i]Notes on Democracy[/i] over 80 years ago. His time, the paranoid and intolerant years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial, is strikingly like our own. [i]Notes[/i] isn't just a blast from the past; it's a perceptive report on today.In Notes, Mencken conducts a bold, libertarian attack on intrusive government, special interest groups, and mob rule that's as relevant today as it was in the 1920s.Notes has something that will appeal to -- and offend -- everyone. Liberals will love Mencken's denunciation of jingoism; conservatives and libertarians will root for his attacks on meddling laws, hand-outs, and equality.The new edition includes an introduction and annotations by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, and an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis.

"The normal American of the 'pure-blooded' majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen." -H. L. Mencken, The Anglo-Saxon (1923) The Anglo-Saxon (1923), is an essay by H. L. Mencken in which he criticized Anglo-Saxonism, a belief system of late 19th century and early 20th century promoting the superiority of English-speaking nations. Mencken, although he considered himself of true Anglo-Saxon ancestry, thought the American Anglo-Saxon to be inferior and weak.