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H. L. Mencken: The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition

Happy Days | Newspaper Days | Heathen Days | Days Revisited: Unpublished Commentary More

Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

A major literary event: Mencken’s dazzling autobiography, with 200 pages of his own never-before-published commentary and photos
———
“The three best memoir writers in American literature are H. L. Mencken.”—P. J. O’Rourke, The New York Times Book Review

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

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In 1936, at the age of fifty-five, H. L. Mencken published a reminiscence of his Baltimore boyhood in The New Yorker. With this modest beginning, Mencken embarked on what would become the Days trilogy, a long and magnificent adventure in autobiography by America’s greatest journalist. Finding it “always agreeable to ponder upon the adventures of childhood” (as he wrote in his diary), Mencken created more of these masterful novelistic evocations of a bygone era, eventually collected in Happy Days (1940). The book was an immediate critical and popular success, surprising many of its readers with its glimpses of a less curmudgeonly Mencken.

Urged by New Yorker editor Harold Ross to send yet more pieces, Mencken moved on from his childhood to revisit the beginnings of his legendary career. Newspaper Days (1941) charts the rise of the brilliant, ambitious young newspaperman, in an astonishingly short time, from cub reporter to managing editor of the Baltimore Herald. Among the book’s memorable episodes are the display of Mencken’s “talent for faking” in his invented dispatches of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War—accounts that largely turned out to be accurate—and his riveting narrative of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. “In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, . . . today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire.”

The final volume of the published trilogy, Heathen Days (1943), recounts his varied excursions as one of America’s most famous men, and one who, by his own account, “enjoyed himself immensely,” including his bibulous adventures during Prohibition and his reporting of the 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution.

Until now, however, the story told in Mencken’s beloved Days books has been incomplete. In the 1940s, Mencken began making extensive notes about the published books, commenting on what he had written and adding new material—but stipulating that these writings were not to be made public until twenty-five years after his death. Days Revisited presents more than two hundred pages of this material for the first time. Commentaries are keyed to the main text they gloss with subtle marks in the margin (the volume includes two ribbons to allow readers to flip back to the notes), and they are supplemented by rare photographs, many taken by Mencken himself. Here is Mencken’s classic autobiography as it has never been seen before.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, editor, is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast and editor of Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters and The Impossible H. L. Mencken, among other works. She edited the Library of America edition of Mencken’s Prejudices.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and two ribbon markers.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Happy Days 1880–1892
Preface
Introduction to the Universe
The Caves of Learning
Recollections of Academic Orgies
The Baltimore of the Eighties
Rural Delights
The Head of the House
Memorials of Gormandizing
The Training of a Gangster
Cops and Their Ways
Larval Stage of a Bookworm
First Steps in Divinity
The Ruin of an Artist
In the Footsteps of Gutenberg
From the Records of an Athlete
The Capital of the Republic
Recreations of a Reactionary
Brief Gust of Glory
The Career of a Philosopher
Innocence in a Wicked World
Strange Scenes and Far Places

Newspaper Days 1899–1906
Preface
Allegro Con Brio
Drill for a Rookie
Sergeant’s Stripes
Approach to Lovely Letters
Fruits of Diligence
The Gospel of Service
Scent of the Theatre
Command
Three Managing Editors
Slaves of Beauty
The Days of the Giants
The Judicial Arm
Recollections of Notable Cops
A Genial Restauranteur
A Girl from Red Lion, P.A.
Scions of the Bogus Nobility
Aliens, but Not Yet Enemies
The Synthesis of News
Fire Alarm
Sold Down the River

Heathen Days 1890–1936
Preface
Downfall of a Revolutionary
Memoirs of the Stable
Adventures of a Y.M.C.A. Lad
The Educational Process
Finale to the Rogue’s March
Notes on Palaeozoic Publicists
The Tone Art
A Master of Gladiators
A Dip into Statecraft
Court of Honor
A Roman Holiday
Winter Voyage
Gore in the Caribbees
Romantic Intermezzo
Old Home Day
The Noble Experiment
Inquisition
Vanishing Act
Pilgrimage
Beaters of Breasts

Days Revisited: Mencken’s Unpublished Commentary
Preface
Notes on Happy Days
Notes on Newspaper Days
Notes on Heathen Days

Chronology
Note on the Texts
Note on the Illustrations
Notes
Index

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-308-8 872 pages

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N° 257 Library of America Series

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