H. L. Mencken

Maryland Historical Society

H.L. Mencken, a prolific journalist and writer known for his aggressive iconoclasm and brilliant style, was born on September 12, 1880, in Baltimore to August Mencken and Anna Abhau Mencken. In 1883, the Menckens moved to 1524 Hollins Street, where Mencken would reside for the rest of his life, except 1930-35, when he lived with his wife Sara Haardt Mencken (1898-1935) at 704 Cathedral Street. Mencken attended the Knapp's Institute (1886-92) and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (1892-96), then worked in his father's cigar factory until 1899, when August Mencken suddenly died and Mencken could begin his journalism career as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald.

In 1905, Mencken became managing editor of the Herald, which folded in 1906. In 1910, he helped to establish the Baltimore Evening Sun; his column, entitled "Free Lance," appeared from 1911 to 1915. Silenced for his pro-German and anti-British views during World War I, Mencken returned to the Evening Sun in 1920; his wide-ranging "Monday Articles" appeared from 1920 to 1938, when he served as temporary editor. Mencken stopped writing for the Sunpapers in 1941 because he disagreed with the paper's support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy. He spent his next seven years working on books and memoirs.

H. L. Mencken

Maryland Historical Society

In 1908, Mencken began writing book reviews for the Smart Set (New York), for which he served as co-editor with George Jean Nathan from 1914 to 1923, when they both resigned and founded the American Mercury (New York) in 1924. In the 1910s, Mencken became the leading proponent of the New Realism (e.g., Theodore Dreiser) in American literature; in the 1920s, he turned to criticism of social, political, and religious life in America. Following the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in (1925) on evolution and the "Hatrack" censorship case in Boston (1926), Mencken was regarded as the country's most powerful journalist. With his savage opposition to FDR and the New Deal and his insensitive reaction to the Depression and the threat of Hitler, though, Mencken's influence declined sharply in the 1930s. He resigned as editor of the American Mercury in 1933.

Mencken also published numerous books, most notably, introductions to George Bernard Shaw's plays (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy (1908), as well as A Book of Prefaces (1917), In Defense of Women (1918), six essay-series of Prejudices (1919-27), The American Language (1919, rev. 1921, 1923, 1936; supplements 1945, 1948), Notes on Democracy (1926), Treatise on the Gods (1930), and Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934). His trilogy of memoirs, Happy Days 1880-1892 (1940), Newspaper Days 1899-1906 (1941), and Heathen Days 1890-1936 (1943), gained Mencken new popularity in the 1940s. My Life as Author and Editor (1993) and Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work (1994) were also written in the 1940s, but were sealed for 35 years after his death. On November 23, 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke, which rendered him unable to read or write; on January 29, 1956, he died of a coronary occlusion.

Fecher, Charles A. Mencken. A Study of His Thought.. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

Fitzpatrick, Vincent. H.L. Mencken. New York: Continuum, 1989. New edition: Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004.

Schrader, Richard J.H. L. Mencken: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Teachout, Terry. The Skeptic. A Life of H.L. Mencken. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.