H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken (born September 12, 1880, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died January 29, 1956, Baltimore) was a controversial journalist and pungent critic of American life who powerfully influenced U.S. fiction through the 1920s and was known for his humorous but combative opinions, especially his attacks on the middle class.

(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)

Mencken attended a Baltimore private school and the Baltimore Polytechnic. He became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899 and in 1906 joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, where he worked at intervals throughout most of his life. From 1914 to 1923 he edited (with George Jean Nathan) The Smart Set, a witty urban magazine influential in the growth of American literature, and in 1924 he and Nathan founded the American Mercury, which Mencken edited until 1933.

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Mencken was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s, and he often used his criticism as a point of departure to jab at various American social and cultural weaknesses. His reviews and miscellaneous essays filled six volumes aptly titled Prejudices (1919–27). In literature he fought against what he regarded as fraudulently successful writers and worked for the recognition of such outstanding newcomers as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. He jeered at American sham, pretension, provincialism, and prudery, and he ridiculed the nation’s organized religion, business, and middle class (or, as he termed it, the “booboisie,” a derisive play on bourgeoisie).

Mencken’s caustic view of life remained with him throughout his career, and in the 1930s and ’40s he altered considerably less than the world around him, with the result that his influence almost disappeared. Few people found the Great Depression a subject for satire of any sort, yet he was as satirical about U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal as he had been about U.S. Pres. Herbert Hoover and Prohibition.

More troubling were his views on Jews and African Americans. For many years the more sympathetic understanding of Mencken was that he was a Germanophile—i.e., someone who favors German culture and customs—who was slower than some of his public to recognize the threat of Adolf Hitler and Nazism and to take it seriously. However, the publication of Mencken’s diaries in 1989 revealed a man with virulent racist and anti-Semitic views. Though Mencken wrote an article in 1948 denouncing Baltimore’s segregation laws, he expressed a patronizing view of Black people in his private writing. In one entry he described Black women as “child-like,” adding that “even hard experience does not teach them anything.” In an entry on the admittance of Jews to the exclusive Maryland Club, Mencken declared Baltimore’s Jews as not “suitable” to be allowed to eat there. He also railed against U.S. participation in World War II and made no comment in his diaries about the discovery of Nazi concentration camps after the war. In his introduction to the published diaries (as The Diary of H.L. Mencken), editor Charles A. Fecher wrote that Mencken “seems to have had no conception at all of what a German-Japanese victory would have meant to the civilized world, or to the liberties that he himself so cherished.”

Mencken made another important contribution to American culture. In 1919 he published a solid volume, The American Language, in an attempt to bring together examples of American, rather than English, expressions and idioms. The book at once attracted attention. It grew with each reissue through the years, and in 1945 and 1948 Mencken published substantial supplements. By the time of his death, he was perhaps the leading authority on the language of his country.

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Mencken’s autobiographical trilogy, Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943), is devoted to his experiences in journalism.