Volume 34, Number 3 · February 26, 1987
Mencken and the Great American Boob
By Alfred Kazin
RECENTLY PUBLISHED WORKS OF MENCKEN MENTIONED IN THIS ESSAY
The Dreiser–Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser & H.L. Mencken, 1907–1945
Vol. I and II, edited by Thomas P. Riggio
University of Pennsylvania Press, 843 pp., $74.90 the set
Mencken and Sara, A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt
edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
McGraw-Hill, 551 pp., $22.95
I was too young for the 1920s and what, already in obituary style, was called The Age of Mencken. I began to read him in the 1930s, when I was writing a book on the modern period. I read him as a vanished if pungent figure, and I read him with suspicion, with furtive and guilty delight. The Depression was heavy on the country, in Europe Hitlerism was rising. Unlike Henry Louis Mencken, who with one quarter of the work force unemployed saw no reason to discard his evaluation of himself as one of 'the comfortable and complacent bourgeoisie, encapsulated in affection and kept fat, saucy, and contented,' I saw great suffering on every street. I entertained the now preposterous belief that here was great social injustice in America, that things could be changed, that they were changing for the better under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but not fast enough.
Review, 5020 words
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