"The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, the one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition." -Alistair Cooke on H.L. Mencken Fiercely intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny, H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial s...
Mencken’s The American Language is a fascinating look at the ever changing nature of language. His premise is that the English spoken by the English differs significantly enough from that spoken by United States residents and that they are, in fact, two very different languages spoken by two very...
This Wonderful Sequel to the best-selling A Mencken Chrestomathy of nearly half a century ago is full of the iconoclastic common sense that marked H. L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956,...
There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel...
PUNCTUATION, CAPITALIZATION, AND ABBREVIATION 413. [In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are in lower case.] Sometimes, indeed, small letters appear at the beginning of sentences and even paragraphs.1 But Franklin, a conservative in this field as ...