Mencken: The American Iconoclast

About this book

A towering figure on the American cultural landscape H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts--the twentieth centurys greatest newspaper journalist a famous wit and a constant figure of controversy. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken the finest book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers illuminates both the public and the private man covering the many love affairs his happy marriage at the age of 50 to Sara Haardt and his complicated but stimulating friendship with the famed theater critic George Jean Nathan. Rodgers vividly recreates Menckens era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America the roaring twenties depressed thirties and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken. When few dared to shatter complacencies Mencken fought for civil liberties and free speech playing a prominent role in the Scopes Monkey Trial battling against press censorship and exposing pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes. Drawing on research in more than sixty archives including private collections in the United States and in Germany previously unseen on exclusive interviews with Menckens friends and on his love letters and FBI files here is the full portrait of one of Americas most colorful and influential men. "This biography the best ever on the sage of Baltimore is exhaustive but never exhausting and offers readers more than moderate intelligence and an awfully good time." --Martin Nolan Boston Globe