The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken [Hardcover]

Terry Teachout (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2002

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 Mercken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped.

From his carefree days as a teenage cub reporter in turn-of-the-century Baltimore to his noisy tenure as founding editor of the American Mercury, the most influential magazine of the twenties, Mencken distinguished himself with a contrary spirit, a razor-sharp wit (he coined the term "Bible Belt"), and a keen eye for such up-and-coming authors as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He covered everything, from the Scopes evolution trial to the 1948 presidential elections, in the pages of the Baltimore Sun. He wrote bestselling books about the failure of democracy, the foibles of the female sex, and what he memorably called "the American language." But his favorite topic was the one he saw wherever he looked: the sterile, life-denying strain of puritanism that he believed was strangling the culture of his native land.

No modern writer has been more controversial than H. L. Mencken. His fans saw him as the fearless leader of the endless battle against ignorance and hypocrisy, while his enemies dismissed him as a cantankerous, self-righteous ideologue. The surging popularity of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the politician he hated most, eventually caused his star to fade, but the unsparing vigor of his critique of American life and letters -- and the raucously colloquial prose style in which he blasted the Babbitts -- retains its freshness and relevance to this day.

Himself an accomplished critic and journalist, Terry Teachout has combed through reams of Mencken's private papers, including the searingly candid autobiographical manuscripts sealed after his death in 1956. Out of this material he has fashioned a portrait of the artist as intellectual gadfly, working newspaperman, devoted husband, and faithless ]over. Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and completely absorbing, The Skeptic vividly evokes the life and legacy of a true American legend.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Journalist, muckraker, political gadfly, atheist, and conservative dissident, H.L. Mencken "was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth--the quintessential voice of American letters." So says the eminent critic Terry Teachout in this landmark biography, which explores why Mencken has been largely forgotten today.

Mencken held to ideas that history was busily sweeping aside. He railed against the growing power of the federal government in the early years of the Roosevelt administration, insisting on an elitist brand of politics that favored the "superior man." He advocated an isolationist course in world affairs, even as totalitarian powers swallowed up whole nations; he agitated against progressive domestic causes; and, albeit ironically, he proposed that capital punishment be turned into a public entertainment. Yet he wrote some of the best, most cruelly entertaining journalism of his time, reporting on great trials, minor crimes, and political conventions, skewering received opinion.

Mencken was "something more than a memorable stylist, if something less than a wise man," Teachout concludes. This careful portrait--the first full-length biography to appear in more than 30 years--gives ample evidence for that verdict. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

There is no lack of material on the curmudgeonly early-20th century journalist, and a devotee could spend years wading through Mencken's three-volume autobiography, two early biographies, and essays in the scholarly journal Menckeniana. However, Teachout simplifies the process for the casual reader, distilling the weight of information on Mencken into a tidy, fascinating biography that has much of the neat phrasing and sly wit that the rancorous writer displayed himself. Organized chronologically, the book follows the fat baby (Mencken noted that if cannibalism hadn't been abolished in his home state of Maryland, he'd have "butchered beautifully"), the teenage cub reporter, the editor and finally the memoirist. By drawing on published works and recently discovered private papers, Teachout puts the skeptic into context, giving as much insight into the Jazz Age as into the writer who hated jazz. Whether describing the quirks of novelist Theodore Dreiser, the rise of the pulp magazine, or the importance of the Scopes trial, the author brings deeper understanding to Mencken's passionate diatribes, and shows that the journalist was not just a product of his times, but a shaper of its attitudes. Although Teachout, a music critic for Commentary, obviously has an avid fascination for and admiration of the man who was determined to take on "braggarts and mountebanks, quacks and swindlers, fools and knaves," this is not a hagiography. He shows that Mencken could be both a fool and a knave, and even an occasional braggart. Yet he was always honest in his opinions, and Teachout's treatment of the material honors that journalistic impulse.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (November 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060505281
• ISBN-13: 978-0060505288
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,340,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic of Commentary. I also blog about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. In addition to the books on this page, I wrote the libretto for Paul Moravec's "The Letter," which was premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in July of 2009. "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" is my first book about music, but I've been listening to jazz ever since my mother told me to come see Satchmo singing "Hello, Dolly!" on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964, and I was a professional bassist before becoming a full-time writer. Among other things, I've written the liner notes for such albums as Diana Krall's "All for You," Maria Schneider's "Coming About," Karrin Allyson's "Daydream," Marian McPartland's "Just Friends," Luciana Souza's "Neruda," and Roger Kellaway's "Live at the Jazz Standard."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A rehash, December 2, 2002

By 

Mark_Frederic (the Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (Hardcover)

Terry Teachout's new biography is largely a rehash of Fred Hobson's biography of Mencken and to complete the feeling of déjà vu, the same controversies that greeted Hobson's book swirl around this one as well. Unlike Lord Byron or de Sade, Mencken led a life that was fairly bourgeois and apparently book reviewers resent it, thus playing up his alleged anti-Semitism. It is something of a fad these days to unmask literary anti-Semites and those who do it sometimes make themselves look foolish. One dunce who reviewed this book for the Seattle Times and compared Mencken unfavorably to Voltaire was apparently unaware of a large body of criticism condemning Voltaire for his anti-Semitism. Teachout himself is apologetic about Mencken's attitudes to the Jews, but doesn't go far enough in pardoning him.

Part of the demonizing of Mencken these days might be attributed to the fact that American society is still intolerant of a critical attitude to religion. Mencken was indeed critical of Judaism. However, as readers of "Treatise on Gods" know, Mencken was also critical of Christianity and Islam. A rationalist to the core, Mencken had little time for people who believed in the supernatural. He detested the religious impulse in Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.

As for those who claim that Mencken is racially prejudice against the Jews, they will have to explain away the fact that, as Teachout shows, Mencken had many close Jewish friends and that he used harsh language toward everyone (the English, the Irish, African-Americans, Italians), not just against the Jews.

As so often with the genteel, the critics of Mencken have focused almost entirely on his manner of writing than rather than the substance of his writing. He argued quite forcefully for a humane foreign policy. Unlike the timid Walter Lippman, Mencken urged the US government to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. For a man who is so often characterized as nasty, he was surprisingly pacific in some of his politics: he was against participation in both world wars.

Much has been made about Teachout's use of Mencken's unpublished writings for this biography and many reviewers have implied that these writings reveal his dark side. Actually, these unpublished writings appear to reveal some new facts, not new prejudices. If Mencken said nasty things in the diaries, a look at his published writings will show that he was nasty there as well. By the way, he could also be nice sometimes too. Again it's just that Mencken's style is far more biting than anything allowed in today's journalism, which is apparently stocked with aspiring political consultants and public relations people.

The best account of the events of Mencken's life is still his Days books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days). The collection of his newspaper columns, The Impossible Mencken, is better reading than this biography and a good record of Mencken's opinions on the issues of the day.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beneath the "Comic Mask", November 14, 2002

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (Hardcover)

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 opinion, perhaps a "sage....not calm and reflective but as noisy as a tornado: witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable." Of special interest to me is Teachout's analysis of Mencken's association with the city of Baltimore in which he lived and worked throughout most of his life (1880-1956).

He left school after his father's death (1899) to become a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, later serving as drama critic, city editor, and then managing editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald. Soon after the Herald folded in 1906, he joined the Baltimore Sun and continued with the Sun as editor, columnist, or contributor for most of his career. He published studies of George Bernard Shaw (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), both of whom he admired. From 1914 to 1923, with George Jean Nathan he co-edited a satirical magazine, The Smart Set; in 1924 he and Nathan co-founded the American Mercury, a cultural magazine for "a civilized minority," which he co-edited for nine years. Mencken has been generally viewed (if viewed at all) as a crusty curmudgeon, never fully appreciated for the quality of his contributions to academic scholarship as well as to journalism during the first third of the 20th century.

To Teachout's great credit, he resurrects rather than revises an abundance of relevant biographical, social, and cultural material which he examines with both precision and circumspection. My guess (only a guess) is that those who read this biography will view Mencken through the filters of their own values. Some will find him "delightful" and "colorful"; others will be offended by his (to put it mildly) political incorrectness; still others will conclude (as Teachout seems to) that Mencken was the archetypical skeptic of almost everyone and everything...except his own opinions. For better or worse, "he was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth." Until reading this biography, I tended to view Mencken as a reasonably well-educated variation of Archie Bunker. Edmund Wilson once suggested that Mencken's public persona was a "comic mask" which concealed an "all-too-human face." In this context, Teachout has succeeded brilliantly in revealing that face.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great review of a great man, January 10, 2003

By 

Max Boot (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (Hardcover)

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 life, and a good flavor of his times, without wallowing in matters only tangentially related to the main story line. Besides telling the story of Mencken's life better than it's ever been told before, Teachout delivers the most balanced and convincing critique of Mencken's thinking that I have ever seen. He doesn't slight Mencken's anti-semitism but doesn't exaggerate its importance either. He shows why Mencken's arguments often weren't very convincing, but also why Mencken continues to attract readers a half-century after his demise. He may not have been the Sage of Baltimore, but Mencken was a peerless prose stylist who deserves to remembered as one of the finest writers America has ever produced. Although Teachout modestly bills his book as "a life" it will go down as the definitive biography of Mencken.