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H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: Fourth, Fifth, & Sixth Series

Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

“What amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.”—Richard Wright

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

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H. L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. In this volume and a companion, The Library of America presents all six series of Prejudices (1919–1927), the iconoclastic collections that helped blast American literature out of its complacency and into a new age of frankness and maturity. The fantastic linguistic inventiveness, full-bodied humor, and unwaveringly fierce courage of his journalism made him a liberating force for his contemporaries.

The final three series show Mencken at his lacerating best, taking on targets from religious fundamentalism to the dismal state of higher education. Included are such famous essays as “The Hills of Zion,” his report on the local atmosphere surrounding the Scopes trial in 1925; “In Memoriam: W.J.B.,” his relentless postmortem on William Jennings Bryan; “The Fringes of Lovely Letters,” a hilarious delineation of the lower and outer reaches of the literary world; “Comstockery,” a devastating account of the anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock (“A good woman, to him, was simply one who was efficiently policed”); and “On Living in Baltimore,” a celebration of his beloved native city.

Mencken was a man of strong enthusiasms and even stronger antipathies, expressed in a prose style that marshaled all the resources of the American language in a rich blend of comic invention and sarcastic fury. To read Prejudices is to embark on an exploration of many curious byways of American culture in a moment of tumultuous and often combative transition. Mencken never shied from combat, and the courage with which he confronted the entrenched truisms and hypocrisies of his time made him a uniquely liberating force in American letters.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, volume 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.

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

Project support for this volume was provided by Kathryn & Roger Penske in honor of Jay Carl Penske.

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

Fourth Series
The American Tradition
The Husbandman
High and Ghostly Matters
    The Cosmic Secretariat
    The Nature of Faith
    The Devotee
    The Restoration of Beauty
    End-Product
    Another
    Holy Clerks
Justice under Democracy
Reflections on Human Monogamy
    The Eternal Farce
    Venus at the Domestic Hearth
    The Rat-Trap
    The Love Chase
    Women as Realpolitiker
    Footnote for Suffragettes
    The Helpmate
    The Mime
    Cavia Cobaya
    The Survivor
    The Veteran’s Disaster
    Moral Indignation
    The Man and His Shadow
    The Balance-Sheet
    Yearning
The Politician
From a Critic’s Notebook
    Progress
    The Iconoclast
    The Artists’ Model
    The Good Citizen as Artist
    Definitive Judgments
Totentanz
Meditations in the Methodist Desert
    The New Galahad
    Optimist vs. Optimist
    Caveat for the Defense
    Portrait of an Ideal World
Essay in Constructive Criticism
On the Nature of Man
    The Animal That Thinks
    Veritas Odium Parit
    The Eternal Cripple
    The Test
    National Characters
    The Goal
    Psychology at 5 A.M.
    The Reward
    The Altruist
    The Man of Honor
Bugaboo
On Government
Toward a Realistic Aesthetic
    The Nature of Art
    The One-Legged Art
    Symbiosis and the Artist
Contributions to the Study of Vulgar Psychology
    The Downfall of the Navy
    The Mind of the Slave
    The Art Eternal
The American Novel
People and Things
    The Capital of a Great Republic
    Ambassadors of Christ
    Bilder aus schöner Zeit
    The High Seas
    The Shrine of Mnemosyne

Fifth Series
Four Moral Causes
    Birth Control
    Comstockery
    Capital Punishment
    War
Four Makers of Tales
    Conrad
    Hergesheimer
    Lardner
    Masters
In Memoriam: W.J.B.
The Hills of Zion
Beethoven
Rondo on an Ancient Theme
Protestantism in the Republic
From the Files of a Book Reviewer
    Counter-Offensive
    Heretics
    The Grove of Academe
    The Schoolma’m’s Goal
    The Heroic Age
    The Woes of a 100% American
    Yazoo’s Favorite
    The Father of Service
    A Modern Masterpiece
    Sweet Stuff
The Fringes of Lovely Letters
    Authorship as a Trade
    Authors as Persons
    Birth Pangs
    Want Ad
    Literature and the Schoolma’am
    The Critic and His Job
    Painting and its Critics
    Greenwich Village
Essay in Pedagogy
On Living in Baltimore
The Last New Englander
The Nation
Officers and Gentlemen
Golden Age
Edgar Saltus
Miscellaneous Notes
    Martyrs
    The Ancients
    Jack Ketch as Eugenist
    Heroes
    An Historic Blunder
    On Cynicism
    Music and Sin
    The Champion
    Honor in America
    Notes in the Margin of a Treatise on Psychology
    Definition
Catechism

Sixth Series
Journalism in America
From the Memoirs of a Subject of the United States
    Government by Bounder
    Constructive Proposal
    The Nature of Government
    Freudian Footnote
    Bach to Bach!
The Human Mind
    On Metaphysicians
    On Suicide
    On Controversy
    On Faith
Clarion Call to Poets
Souvenirs of a Book Reviewer
    The Emperor of Wowsers
    Thwacks from the Motherland
    The Powers of the Air
    To the Glory of an Artist
    God Help the South!
    The Immortal Democrat
    Fides Ante Intellectum
    Speech Day in the Greisenheim
    Professors of English
Five Little Excursions
    Brahms
    Johann Strauss
    Poetry in America
    Victualry as a Fine Art
    The Libido for the Ugly
Hymn to the Truth
The Pedagogy of Sex
Metropolis
Dives into Quackery
    Chiropractic
    Criminology
    Eugenics
Life Under Bureaucracy
In the Rolling Mills
Ambrose Bierce
The Executive Secretary
Invitation to the Dance
Aubade
Appendix from Moronia
    Note on Technic
    Interlude in the Socratic Manner
    Valentino

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-075-9 612 pages

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