Volume 28, Number 10 · June 11, 1981
Saving a Whale
By Murray Kempton
A Choice of Days: Essays from "Happy Days," "Newspaper Days," and "Heathen Days,"
by H.L. Mencken, selected and introduced by Edward L. Galligan
Knopf, 337 pp., $12.95
On Mencken
edited by John Dorsey
Arlington House, 206 pp., $8.95
The Young Mencken: The Best of His Work
collected by Carl Bode
Dial, 576 pp., $15.00
The American Scene: A Reader
by H.L. Mencken, edited by Huntington Cairns
Knopf, 542 pp., $15.00
H.L. Mencken on Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
edited by Malcolm Moos
Vintage (out of print), 365 pp., $1.85 (paper)
Letters of H.L. Mencken
edited by Guy J. Forgue
Knopf (out of print), 506 pp., $12.50
A Mencken Chrestomathy
edited and annotated by H.L. Mencken
Knopf, 627 pp., $15.95
A Choice of Days and On Mencken make up Knopf's testament to Henry L. Mencken on the hundredth year since his birth. We should, of course, be grateful to have any memorial less degrading than those essays of R. Emmett Tyrrell through which Mencken's ghost now and then flickers like some damned soul in hell. All the same these garlands, though altogether worthier and more scrupulously worked, seem somehow not quite up to their subjects.
Review, 5066 words
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