A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing (Paperback)

This book is a collection of Mencken's writings, mostly from previous books he wrote: the "Prejudices" series, "In Defense of Women", "A Book of Burlesques", et al. Some of the offerings are from the magazines he edited: "American Mercury" and "Smart Set", with a few newspaper articles for good measure. The copyright listings go back as far as 1917.

Mencken discusses everything from men and women, government, morals, religion, music and history, to odd fish, quackery, pedagogy, psychology and buffooneries.

Listed under the latter rubric, one will find a work entitled "A Neglected Anniversary", which started the famous bathtub hoax, explained by the author in his notes, for those unfamiliar with the Great Man and his life and times.

A second of Mencken's commentaries, which seems to have gained more fame than some of the others, is "The Sahara of the Bozart", page 184. The American South is H.L.M.'s subject here, thus: "Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity...that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums...it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomic...." Ouch!

One may not agree with his opinions, but one must acknowledge that he expresses them very well, and that reading his writings is great entertainment.

H.L. Mencken is probably the greatest American writer of the 20th Century, if not of all time. Enjoy.

This book contains one of my favorite essay and the single biggest reason to own this book, his piece on the critical process. It's only a 10 page essay but it's probably the most eloquent. For whatever reason he put it around page 450, but I would recommend reading it first. It puts a reader in the right frame of mind for reading Mencken's essays. He explains a worthwhile critic is not so much concerned with truth or detail. Instead a truly great critic takes the target of the criticism and uses it to develop his own original ideas. It separates those who would just be archivists with those who would be artists. Clearly, Mencken was not concerned with the former, he was concerned with art and he was an artist.

What makes this book brilliant is its terse structure- it is fragmented and in short pieces, and this produces his intense compact wit in wave after wave of the finest observations and thoughts to come out of mortal man since Tom Sawyer. A Mencken Chrestomathy utterly fails to do badly at every turn.

If you have glanced at this book, and have even a tiny thought at not buying at least two copies, shoot yourself in the foot for punishment, then go buy a dozen copies and pass them out to your superior friends as rewards for their sagacity and charm and as a reward for their loyalty. But if you have little humanity and wish to punish a friend or make their lives more miserable, do not tell them of this book, and leave it right where it is.

I give no book this high a regard. But I give this one my complete, unconditional support. If you have the means, I suggest buying a thousand copies and distributing it among the hungry of mind for the wonderful elixer of an effect Mencken has upon the mind.

The only thing bad about this book is the covers are too close together.