a review by George Hunka H.L. MENCKEN cut his satirical teeth on drama and theatre, as the excellent new anthology, The Collected Drama of H.L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism, edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Scarecrow Press, attests. Joshi has collected all of Mencken’s plays (many of which first appeared in the 1916 A Book of Burlesques) and a Continue Reading →
by Gore Vidal AFTER POLITICS, JOURNALISM has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. American exceptions to mediocrity’s leaden mean: From column A, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt. From column B, H.L. Mencken. Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche, and a school Continue Reading →
by W.J. Cash (pictured) FOR years it has been the fashion with historians to explain the white cracker of the South as simply the product of degenerate blood-strains from Europe — the progeny of the convict-servants and redemptioners of Old Virginia. But the theory defies logic and the known facts. Actually, the source of the cracker is identical with that Continue Reading →
by Ed Dieckmann, Jr. from The American Mercury, Winter, 1969 EARLY IN MAY of this year, a courageous mother, Mrs. Lois Godfrey of Garden Grove, California, succeeded in getting sensitivity training outlawed, at least temporarily, in the Garden Grove Unified School District. Mrs. Godfrey withdrew two of her children from a class in which the process was being used, then Continue Reading →
by H.L. Mencken (pictured) I OFTEN WONDER how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill must surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef a lion downs at Continue Reading →