Publication Date: August 1, 1986 | Series: Maryland Paperback Bookshelf
This is the first biography since his death of the man Edmund Wilson has called the “greatest practicing literary journalist” since Poe. It is also the first fully documented life to be issued. Mr. Bode has based his book on a host of Mencken letters, many unpublished; on family papers; on a variety of Mencken materials in print and out; and on many taped interviews with remaining friends of Mencken as well as with some of his old enemies. Two other things about the book are important “firsts.” The book analyzes Mencken’s writing as it related to his life. And the book indicates the relation of Mencken to his time
Mr Bode’s Mencken takes us from the almost pastoral Baltimore of the 1880’s when Mencken was a boy; through World War I when Mencken was termed a traitor; into the Roaring Twenties when he was the decade’s leading intellectual, magazine editor, and newspaper man; into the Depression when his influence sank to nearly nothing; then into the 1940’s when he issued his mellow reminiscences; and finally to his last years in Baltimore.
Among the chapters are: “Daily and Sunday,” “Dreiser and the Fruits of Dissidence,” “The Mercury: Mencken’s Mind and Art,” “Mainstay of the Sun,”“Mencken, Darwin, and God,” “Mencken in Love,” “The Circus of Dr. R.,” and “Friends and Familiars.”
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Carl Bode is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He has written widely on various phases of American literature, particularly on twentieth-century culture.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Paperback: 452 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (August 1, 1986)
Bode's biography of Mencken changed my life, in that is was an introduction to the Baltimore critic Mencken's role in shaping libertarian thought and appreciation. Actually, I daydreamed back in college through a linguistics class that used Mencken's American Language textbook, but it took Bode's biography to teach me how important Mencken was to realism and the fight against puritans and Big Government pablum. While I ignored the classics in school, Bode's story of Mencken's critique of the great writers of the 20's and 30's gave me a list of books to read. As a libertarian Mencken's favorites -- Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, etc. -- have delighted me as much as Bode's biography. The lonely, creative individualist in Dreiser's "The Genius" and Conrad's "Victory" is the same character that Mencken is. For that matter, Ayn Rand seems to be in a similar class as Mencken. Thank God I stumbled upon Bode's book.
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