Back Prejudices: The Complete Series (boxed set)

H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (boxed set)

Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

“It took me nearly a dozen years of rummaging through used bookstores in numerous states to find all six of the original Prejudices volumes. Now The Library of America edition brings these works back to life.”—John Lippman, Los Angeles Times

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week H. L. Mencken, “The Hills of Zion”
September 23, 2022

Story of the Week H. L. Mencken, “The Diary of a Retreat”
January 31, 2017

H. L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness.

In the six volumes of Prejudices (1919–1927), Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken’s prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Irreverent portraits of such major contemporaries as Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and William Dean Howells contrast with explorations of fascinating byways of American culture in a time of tumultuous and often combative transition.

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.

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

Project support for these volumes was provided by Kathryn & Roger Penske in honor of Jay Carl Penske.
Table of Contents

First Series
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
The Late Mr. Wells
Arnold Bennett
The Dean
Professor Veblen
The New Poetry Movement
The Heir of Mark Twain
Hermann Sudermann
George Ade
The Butte Bashkirtseff
Six Members of the Institute
The Boudoir Balzac
    A Stranger on Parnassus
    A Merchant of Mush
    The Last of the Victorians
    A Bad Novelist
    A Broadway Brandes
The Genealogy of Etiquette
The American Magazine
The Ulster Polonius
An Unheeded Law-Giver
The Blushful Mystery
    Sex Hygiene
    Art and Sex
    A Loss to Romance
    Sex on the Stage
George Jean Nathan
Portrait of an Immortal Soul
Jack London
Among the Avatars
Three American Immortals
    Aristotelean Obsequies
        Edgar Allan Poe
Memorial Service

Second Series
The National Letters
    Prophets and Their Visions
    The Answering Fact
    The Ashes of New England
    The Ferment Underground
    In the Literary Abattoir
    Underlying Causes
    The Lonesome Artist
    The Cultural Background
    Under the Campus Pump
    The Intolerable Burden
    Epilogue
Roosevelt: An Autopsy
The Sahara of the Bozart
The Divine Afflatus
Scientific Examination of a Popular Virtue
Exeunt Omnes
The Allied Arts
    On Music-Lovers
    Opera
    The Music of To-morrow
    Tempo di Valse
    The Puritan as Artist
    The Human Face
    The Cerebral Mime
The Cult of Hope
The Dry Millennium
    The Holy War
    The Lure of Babylon
    Cupid and Well-Water
    The Triumph of Idealism
Appendix on a Tender Theme
    The Nature of Love
    The Incomparable Buzzsaw
    Women as Spectacles
    Woman and the Artist
    Martyrs
    The Burnt Child
    The Supreme Comedy
    A Hidden Cause
    Bad Workmanship

Third Series
On Being an American
Huneker: A Memory
Footnote on Criticism
Das Kapital
    Ad Imaginem Dei Creavit Illum
    The Life of Man
    The Anthropomorphic Delusion
    Meditation on Meditation
    Man and His Soul
    Coda
Star-Spangled Men
The Poet and His Art
Five Men at Random
    Abraham Lincoln
    Paul Elmer More
    Madison Cawein
    Frank Harris
    Havelock Ellis
The Nature of Liberty
The Novel
The Forward-Looker
Memorial Service
Education
Types of Men
    The Romantic
    The Skeptic
    The Believer
    The Worker
    The Physician
    The Scientist
    The Business Man
    The King
    The Average Man
    The Truth-Seeker
    The Pacifist
    The Relative
    The Friend
The Dismal Science
Matters of State
    Le Contrat Social
    On Minorities
Reflections on the Drama
Advice to Young Men
    To Him That Hath
    The Venerable Examined
    Duty
    Martyrs
    The Disabled Veteran
    Patriotism
Suite Américaine
    Aspiration
    Virtue
    Eminence

Appendix
from My Life as Author and Editor

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: 978-1-59853-076-6 1222 pages

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