H.L. Mencken was a literary giant in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but fell from the pinnacle of popularity as the Great Depression hit. His consistent opposition to FDR and the New Deal moved him further and further away from the limelight, and his outspoken opposition to the war rendered him all but unpublishable from 1941 until his death. A large collection of his shorter works from 1914 through 1927 were published in Prejudices, running to six volumes.
The books are back in print, in two large volumes, through Library of America. An excerpt from the New York Review of Books just starts to get interesting before the cut-off for non-subscribers:
The material that H.L. Mencken published in a series of six volumes under the title Prejudices was a collection of his journalism written between 1914 and the late 1920s. Most of it, he told a good friend on publication of the first volume in 1919, was “light stuff” with an occasional “blast from the lower woodwind” that would “outrage the umbilicari, if that is the way to spell it.” Such books, he added, were “mere stinkpots, heaved occasionally to keep the animals perturbed.”
Most of the pieces in the first volume — or “series,” as it was called — had originally appeared in The Smart Set, the magazine he had edited since 1914, but they also included articles published in newspapers, as well as material written especially for the book. A painstaking editor of his own work, Mencken also did a good bit of rewriting; stinkpot or not, this was not to be a quick harum-scarum hustling of secondhand goods but a high-quality piece of prose from a master.
Its commercial success surprised him as well as his friend and publisher, Alfred Knopf, who seemed to realize for the first time that Mencken had a promising future, or, as he expressed it to his author, “that H.L. Mencken has become a good property.” The book was quickly followed by Prejudices: Series Two, Series Three, and so on to a final Series Six in 1927, by which time Mencken had developed from a good property into the most exciting literary figure in the country.
H/T to Mark at Unambiguously Ambidexterous for the link.
