Who is henry louis mencken

Gerhart, Quote It Completely! Knopf, , p. However, the authorship of the quote does not lie with any work original to Mencken, and was previously reported as an anonymous quote. When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats. Mencken quotes this in Newspaper Days, — as a maxim he learned from Al Goodman. Sinclair denounces it bitterly because it is succeeding. He is a romantic fellow, and life is constantly shocking him. But he has written instructive and amusing book.

At last it has happened. After days of ineffectual argument and legal quibbling, with speeches that merely skirted the edges of the matter which everyone wanted discussed in the Scopes anti-evolution trial. William Jennings Bryan, fundamentalist, and Clarence Darrow, agnostic and pleader of unpopular causes, locked horns today under the most remarkable circumstances ever known by American court procedure.

It was on the courthouse lawn, where Judge Raulston had moved so that more persons could hear, with the Tennessee crowds whopping for their angry champion, who shook his fist in the quizzical satiric face of Mr. Darrow, that Mr.

Bryan was put on the stand by the defense to prove that the Bible need not be taken literally. The youthful Attorney General Stewart, desperately trying to bring the performance within legal bounds, asked, "What is the meaning of this harangue?

Darrow, lifting his voice in one of the few moments of anger he showed, "to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States. Bryan sprang to his feet, his face purple, and shook his fist in the lowering, gnarled face of Mr. Darrow, while he cried: "To protect the word of God from the greatest atheist and agnostic in the United States. And then for nearly two hours, while those below broke into laughter or applause or cried out encouragement to Mr.

Bryan, Mr. Darrow goaded his opponent. His face flushed under Mr. Darrow's searching words, and he writhed in an effort to keep himself from making heated replies.

His eyes glared at his lounging opponent, who stood opposite him, glowering under his bulging brow, speculatively tapping his arm with his spectacles. No greater contrast in men could be imagined. Mencken only lived away from this address during the five years he was married to Goucher College English professor Sara Haardt. When she died of tuberculosis, Mencken, then 55, moved back to his familiar birth home, where he lived the rest of his life with his brother August.

An avid reader, Mencken had a library card before he was nine. By the time he reached high school, he claimed to be "one of the most assiduous customers that the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore has had in its whole history. Often referred to as "The Voltaire of his time," Mencken spoke of Baltimore as "a perfect lady. He coined the term "booboisie" to describe the American public.

He wrote a popular, though caustic, column about local issues in The Baltimore Sun and published numerous books of in-depth studies and commentaries on various aspects of American lifestyle, including religion, democracy, women, and prejudices.

Mencken, Henry Louis, Editor, essayist, and critic. Henry Louis Mencken was a writer of enormous national influence who also played a leading role in southern intellectual life of the s. As such, he was, Walter Lippmann wrote, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.

Mencken shocked southerners when he published a severe indictment of southern culture, "The Sahara of the Bozart," which first appeared in in the New York Evening Mail and was reprinted in his book, Prejudices, Second Series In his essay he charged that the South was "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.