Henry Louis Mencken. 1880-1956

A Collection Of Works By And About H. L. Mencken

When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to be on hand at the initial presentation. The result, that audience knows, will be an experience of pure enjoyment. His musicianship is unfailing. His program is unsatisfactory only in its impermanence. Though the theme he proposes is invariably Mencken Mencken apropos of this or that he gives it infinite and intricate variations.
From Fanfare By Burton Rascoe

Among all this criticism there is one critic. His name is H. L. Mencken. He may provoke animosity, he may rouse protestations even vehement, but he is read, he is attended to. With foundations perhaps solider than any solemn professor of them all, he is not solemn. He is not bored: whether or not he approves of the American welter, it does not bore him. He attacks his material with gusto. A criticism by him is as absorbing as a well-planned short story. Just as much art goes into it.
From The American Critic By Vincent O Sullivan

George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)

The reputation of Mr. Shaw as a playwright has so far exceeded his renown as a novelist, a socialist, a carttail orator, a journeyman reformer, a vegetarian, and a critic of literature and the arts, that his novels and other minor works have been noticed but briefly.

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the music (and quasi-music) of Richard Strauss: herein we have our modern substitutes for Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There is no escaping Nietzsche. You may hold him a hissing and a mocking and lift your virtuous skirts as you pass him by, but his roar is in your ears and his blasphemies sink into your mind.

A Book for the Gourmet Short book review. (1910)

The bill of fare is a perpetual mystery. It is useless to seek to master it by sitting up nights with a French dictionary, for the nouns and adjectives upon it have esoteric and unearthly meanings

The Artist: A Drama Without Words (1912)

During the action of the play not a word is uttered aloud. All of the speeches of the characters are supposed to be unspoken meditations only.

Europe After 8:15, by H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

The scene is the brow of the Hungerberg at Innsbruck. It is the half-hour before sunset, and the whole lovely valley of the Inn—still wie die Nacht, tief wie das Meer—begins to glow with mauves and apple greens, apricots and silvery blues. Along the peaks of the great snowy mountains which shut it in, as if from the folly and misery of the world.

A Book of Burlesques (1916)

The references to a Europe not yet devastated by war and an America not yet polluted by Prohibition show that some of the pieces first saw print in far better days than these.

A Little Book in C Major (1916)

The one breathless passion of every woman is to get someone married. If she's single, it's herself. If she s married, it's the women her husband would probably marry if she were to die tomorrow.

A Book of Prefaces (1917)

Edgar Allan Poe, I am fond of believing, earned as a critic a good deal of the excess of praise that he gets as a romancer and a poet, and another over-estimated American dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote the best textbook of prosody in English; but in general the critical writing done in the United States has been of a low order...

In Defense of Women (1917)

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow.

A Neglected Anniversary. (1917)

A false history of the bathtub

Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)

It is argued against certain books, by virtuosi of moral alarm, that they depict vice as attractive. This recalls the king who hanged a judge for deciding that an archbishop was a mammal.

The American Language (1919)

That it should be regarded as an anti-social act to examine and exhibit the constantly growing differences between English and American, as certain American pedants argue sharply---this doctrine is quite beyond my understanding. All it indicates, stripped of sophistry, is a somewhat childish effort to gain the approval of Englishmen

Repetition Generale. (May 1919) With George Jean Nathan

Rosemaries. — A man, looking back over the bridge of the years, always sentimentalizes his first love affair. A woman always gives hers the laugh.

Repetition Generale. (July 1919) With George Jean Nathan

Histoire d' Amour, — There once was a woman. There once was a man. There once was a woman. . .

The Infernal Mystery (1919) Short book review

THE parlous state of Christian theology, emerging from the war with two black eyes, both ears in tatters and its tail cut off, summons all the divines and metaphysicians of the Western world to a sort of death-bed autopsy or preliminary coroner's inquest...

The American Credo by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. (1920)

The superficial, no doubt, will mistake this little book for a somewhat laborious attempt at jocosity. Because, incidentally to its main purpose, it unveils occasional ideas of so inordinate an erroneousness that they verge upon the ludicrous, it will be set down a piece of spoofing, and perhaps denounced as in bad taste.

Prejudices: First Series (1919)

EVERY now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of their own craft.

Prejudices: Second series (1921)

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He never quite trusts himself thereafter.

The Antichrist, by F. W. Nietzsche. Translated by H. L. Mencken. 1923

Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, “Ecce Homo,” “The Antichrist” is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form.

Pistols For Two by Owen Hatteras. 1924

Owen Hatteras is the pseudonym of H. L. Mencken and G. J. Nathan. The book contains a biography of Nathan, introductory and closing remarks by Mencken and a biography of Mencken by Nathan. cf. Frey, Carroll.

The Hills of Zion (1925)

It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., but I went down there very willingly, for I was eager to see something of evangelical Christianity as a going concern.

Melancholy Reflections (1925)

On Dec. 28, 1917, I printed in the New York Evening Mail, a paper now extinct, an article purporting to give the history of the bathtub. This article, I may say at once, was a tissue of absurdities...

Libido for the Ugly (1927)

Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination-and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.