The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken
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Book Overview
When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the booboisie. Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him. Now Terry Teachout takes on the man Edmund Wilson called our greatest practicing literary journalist, brilliantly capturing all of Mencken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped.
Customer Reviews
Rated 5 starsA Great Book about a Complex Personage
H.L.M. was one of the greater journalists who ever lived in America. More so than almost anyone, he lifted an intellectual class up from the chains of religious orthodoxy. He had an amazing gift for epigrams, penses, and bon mots. He also promoted several authors we take for granted today into the limelight which first shone upon them. Finally, he wrote some of the best books (e.g., Happy Days) about turn of the century...
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Rated 5 starsAn Impressive Introduction To The Sage Of Baltimore
It's now been almost half a century since H.L. Mencken's death, but the debate over his life and works only seems to grow more passionate. Much of this was undoubtedly the design of the Sage of Baltimore himself. He took great care in preserving and ordering his papers, and wrote two volumes of memoir and a diary designed to be opened only long after his departure. The publication of these works--the diary, "My Life as Author...
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Rated 5 starsA great review of a great man
When I first picked up "The Skeptic" I was a bit, errr, skeptical: barely 400 pages to cover the 40-odd working years of America's greatest 20th century journalist? It didn't seem enough, especially when long-forgotten literary figures often get biographies twice as thick. But it didn't take many pages to convince me. Teachout has delivered a model of concise but enthralling biography. He gives all the essentials of Mencken's...
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Rated 5 starsBeneath the "Comic Mask"
The title does not begin to suggest (nor could any title) the nature and extent of Mencken's intellectual and emotional complexity. Regrettably, for whatever reasons, he has received very little attention in recent years. My hope is that Teachout's biography will attract the attention it richly deserves and thereby direct attention to someone who was at one time a major figure in America's intellectual community. In Teachout's...
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Rated 5 starsFrank assessment of a brilliant, yet flawed man.....
Terry Teachout's new book about H.L. Mencken is a revelation, largely because it is no mere hagiography; nor does it attempt to smear Mencken as a one-dimensional bigot. Instead, Teachout admits that while yes, Mencken was anti-Semetic, often petty, and sometimes out of touch (especially from about 1935 on), he was also a brilliant writer, master critic, and unparalleled wit in the Mark Twain tradition. Teachout provides a...
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