My Life As Author And Editor [Hardcover]

H.L. Mencken (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 1993

After thirty-five years in a sealed vault, the autobiography of one of America's greatest social and literary critics chronicles Mencken's remarkable life, discussing his rivalries, feuds, and friendships; his views on the world; and much more. 12,500 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Any best-of list dealing with American political satire has to include H.L. Mencken, who was the country's leading social critic between the world wars. This volume of new material was written at the end of his life, well after his epochal days at the Smart Set and the American Mercury were over and his pro-German sentiments had driven him from the national stage. My Life as Author and Editor is taken from the immense unfinished manuscript that was deposited in the Enoch Pratt Free Library upon Mencken's death; in accordance with his wishes, the packet was not read for 35 years. To modern readers, it is not scandalous as much as fiercely opinionated; Mencken pulls no punches regarding the people he met and the life he led from 1896 to 1923. Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Pound, Joyce, and many others all pass under Mencken's gimlet eye. Along the way, plenty of the author's criticism is heaped on "Life in These United States," the stupidity and lack of sophistication that Mencken raged against his entire career. Better examples of Mencken's satire can be found, but as an introduction to the author's gruff charm and bombast, My Life as Author and Editor is well-suited. And, of course, it is a necessity for the devoted Mencken fan. --Michael Gerber --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Mencken's unfinished, leisurely memoir, which he set aside in 1948 following a severe stroke and ordered locked away for 35 years after his death, covers his literary apprenticeship, his co-editorship of The Smart Set and his feuds and friendships with Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Alfred Knopf and others. There is much of the bellicose Mencken here, lamenting "the always dipping curve of American imbecility," deflating the Algonquin Roundtable literati and offering ruthlessly candid literary portraits. Yet, along with the dour sage of Baltimore, we get Mencken the vivacious gadabout, tippler and admirer of women as his intellectual equals. Mencken annoys with his frequent anti-Semitic remarks, his pro-German stance in WW I and other prejudices. Washington Post book critic Yardley, who has trimmed the original manuscript by 60%, provides an informative introduction to this period piece, which focuses on the years 1908-1923, with forays into the '30s and '40s.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 449 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 11, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679413154
• ISBN-13: 978-0679413158
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,789,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Sage of Baltimore, interrupted, June 19, 2001

By 

The Sanity Inspector (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life as Author and Editor (Paperback)

Even after all this time, we still feel the impact of H. L. Mencken's arrival on the literary scene in the opening years of the 20th century. He wrote millions of words, and has been the subject of many biographies. Despite all the ink spilled by and about him, the fragmentary nature of his autobiographical works still strikes one as a tragedy. He began keeping a diary from the mid-Thirties, when he was over fifty, and his career-ending stroke cut this autobiography off just before he started writing about his glory years of the Twenties.

It's a pity, certainly, but editor Jonathan Yardley has done a splendid job editing the manuscript down to this book. Yardley succeeded in accomplishing his goal, to "let Mencken be Mencken" and to keep himself in the background. One approvingly contrasts this style of editing with David Cairns well-researched but fussily-footnoted _Memoirs of Hector Berlioz_.

So, we have Mencken's own account of the beginnings of his career, and his encounters with publishers, editors, poets, writers, and other notables of the 1910s. The only person who gets treated as an equal is his partner at _The Smart Set_ magazine, George Jean Nathan. Most everyone else has their weaknesses and strengths--if they have any strengths in his eyes--baldly and succinctly described. We meet the then up-and-coming Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ezra Pound, to mention a few. Mencken gives us some flash-forwards every now and then--we see Pound as a raving brownshirt in the Thirties, demanding to be published in Mencken's magazine. Mencken prints the text of the withering reply he sent back.

Mencken's tone can be off-putting for a neutral reader. He frequently comes across as suaver-than-thou, unconned and unconnable. But most likely only people who already love Mencken will read this anyway, so they will enjoy themselves nonetheless. And he is very funny in some vignettes. Read the one where he and Nathan pretend to be interested in a tramp poet's tour of Greenwich Village.

There are two paragraphs early on in the book which may serve as the thesis statement for his whole life and career. In them, he describes how he was never attracted to religion or its secular imitations, nor ever considered himself a tool of the plutocracy. And indeed, a review of his output does show that he fell into his distinctively cynical style very early in his career, and never seemed to find cause to depart from it. In this biography he relates his activities and his reasons for them with very few emotional asides. Like a speakeasy gin-and-tonic, this is astringent stuff--but it hits the spot.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mencken dishes dirt, April 18, 2006

By 

John Rush (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life as Author and Editor (Paperback)

Would Mencken have finished this account had he not been cajoled into covering the 1948 political conventions? Maybe his stroke, which occurred before he started recording his American Mercury years, would have happened at the same time regardless, but his convention work that year seemed to exacerbate his ill health, and could have hastened the apoplexy that prevented him from writing (and reading) for the rest of his life. Furthermore, he could have used those weeks to advance the narrative at least through the Coolidge era, and maybe to its end.

As it is, we're left with Mencken's only incomplete book. The title would be accurate if "Half Of" preceded it: many topics and people are traced to date, but, aside from a short first chapter, all of them are introduced during his Smart Set years, which ended in 1923. Also, Mencken's work as an author uses far less ink than his work as an editor.

This is Mencken's most gossipy memoir, and at times his dirt-dishing is irritating; several digressions discuss Broadway and Hollywood types. However, this liability is often an asset. I'd not heard of Lilith Benda until reading Mencken's passage about her; now, I want to read what she wrote. The memories of other authors, books, publishers and magazines are kept alive. Various peripheral characters add color to the story.

While many of the authors Mencken discussed receive a paragraph or so, he gave Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis their own miniature biographies. When they met, Lewis was drunk and obnoxiously proclaiming his latest book, "Main Street", but Mencken afterwards confided to his Smart Set co-editor George Nathan that he couldn't imagine such a lush writing anything worthwhile. He changed his mind after reading the "Main Street" proofs the next morning on his return trip to Baltimore; he reported that he immediately and enthusiastically wired to Nathan, "That idiot has written a masterpiece."

Some examples of Mencken's outlook are here, including, "I never had any belief in religion, and even as a youth I never went through the Socialist green sickness that was then almost universal. I was against Bryan the moment I heard of him, and my interest in Roosevelt I was always born of delight in the Mountebank, not of belief in the prophet. As I have recorded in "Newspaper Days", my first adventures as a reporter convinced me that the uplift in all its branches was only buncombe. I was not, of course, a partisan of the economic royalists who then ran the Republic - on the contrary, I believed that most of them were thieves and that all of them were frauds - but it seemed to me that, at their worst, they were appreciably better than the Chaldeans and soothsayers who proposed to drive them out of power, if only because they were at least more or less competent at their nefarious business. Competence, indeed, was my chief admiration, then as now, and next to competence I put what is called being a good soldier - that is, not whining. For the rest, I inclined toward my father's Chinese doctrine that the first of positive duties was to keep one's engagements." Such digressions, while out of place, are always welcome. Also out of place are his home remodeling and his Baltimore Evening Sun accounts (the first third of Chapter XI should instead be in "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work"), though the evolution of newspaper articles into magazine pieces and book chapters belongs.

While he occasionally reviewed antiquarian works, Mencken stressed, "My chief concern was always with the literature that was in being, to wit, the unrolling literature of a far from civilized, and even not altogether literate democracy." His ideas "were, in the main, scientific rather than moral or aesthetic: I was in favor of the true long before I was in favor of either the good or the beautiful."

When Mencken and Nathan became Smart Set co-editors in 1914, they agreed that both would have to approve a manuscript before it would be published. Most of their work was accomplished outside of the office; Mencken usually read manuscripts at his Baltimore home or on the train between there and New York City.

Mencken wrote about the other pulps (Parisienne, Saucy Stories, and Black Mask) he and Nathan initiated. He also provided the background to a decisive victory over the prudish Comstocks.

The book discusses some of Mencken's unpublished materials that are sadly lost to posterity. These include many letters he wrote, an article on World War I during its early months for Atlantic Monthly, and material he'd accumulated for a planned history of the corruption behind WWI.

Mencken's efforts at self-promotion were unique. He often baited his detractors into spreading his name; he once made a brochure of a favorable Christian Register editorial about him to answer those who called him an atheist.

The dates are sometimes wrong, and Mencken occasionally repeated himself. In one contradiction, Mencken noted that the sister of Woodrow Wilson's wife contacted him "So late as July 15, 1936", but on the next page, he stated, "I heard no more from her after 1930."

Still, this is Mencken as only Mencken thought and wrote, and is worth reading for that alone. It's one of those books that you don't want to end, especially where it did.