Volume 37, Number 11 · June 28, 1990

Viva Mencken!

By John Kenneth Galbraith
The Diary of H.L. Mencken
edited by Charles A. Fecher

Knopf, 476 pp., $30.00

A few months ago the National Press Club in Washington, an organization committed, along with much else, to the higher principles of the press, moved to retitle its library. Celebrating as the room did the literary and journalistic eminence of H.L. Mencken, the name was thought to have become a serious source of embarrassment even to journalists accommodated to the current Capitol scene. Mencken, his newly published diary revealed, was anti-Semitic; no one with such views could thus be honored any longer.



Review, 1664 words

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