The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken

H.L.M. was one of the greater journalists who ever lived in America. More so than almost anyone, he lifted an intellectual class up from the chains of religious orthodoxy. He had an amazing gift for epigrams, penses, and bon mots. He also promoted several authors we take for granted today into the limelight which first shone upon them. Finally, he wrote some of the best books (e.g., Happy Days) about turn of the century life. However, he was also an anti-Semite (although he had many close Jewish friends) and was utterly blind to the evils of Hitler. As he gets older, his grasp of world begins to weaken. Today I'm sure the politically correct crowd writes him off without thought as 'a dead, white, male', little appreciating the high irony that H.L.M. created virtually single handedly the liberal atmosphere of discourse on which they depend. Teachout has done a superb job of updating his life from numerous sources which have only become available recently. It is a tale rich in period detail and interesting characters. Dreiser, Sinclair, Knopf, Bryan, Twain and others walk through this narrative and each leaves a memorable wake behind them. You should read this book for the quotes from H.L.M. alone. The period details and the famous personages in the narrative will significantly compound the reward you get for reading this book.

It's now been almost half a century since H.L. Mencken's death, but the debate over his life and works only seems to grow more passionate. Much of this was undoubtedly the design of the Sage of Baltimore himself. He took great care in preserving and ordering his papers, and wrote two volumes of memoir and a diary designed to be opened only long after his departure. The publication of these works--the diary, "My Life as Author and Editor," and "Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work," helped spark a new round of debate about Mencken, and also helped pave the way for Terry Teachout's fine biography.Teachout has mined the rich Mencken trove to produce a life story that's vivid, engaging and a pleasure to read. He confronts the Big Questions about Mencken--especially his anti-Semitism--quite directly. He celebrates the man's achievements, points out his faults and blind spots, but does so through the perspective of a life-long interest in the man. As he explains in the introduction, his eighth-grade social studies teacher gave him his first book on Mencken.In a relatively brief 349 pages, Teachout manages to cover the sweep of the Mencken story...from the boy reporter who first made his mark at the end of the 19th century, to the literary critic who made such a splash in the teens and twenties ("discovering" the likes of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis); to the memorable battles he waged against the "booboisie," the great unknowing masses who he saw as the scourge of society; to the self-trained scholar who performed pioneering work in the field of the American language. It's a great introduction to the man for anyone who isn't familiar with him, and can be read with pleasure by those who do know him. A first-rate biography in every sense.--William C. Hall

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.

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.

Terry Teachout's new book about H.L. Mencken is a revelation, largely because it is no mere hagiography; nor does it attempt to smear Mencken as a one-dimensional bigot. Instead, Teachout admits that while yes, Mencken was anti-Semetic, often petty, and sometimes out of touch (especially from about 1935 on), he was also a brilliant writer, master critic, and unparalleled wit in the Mark Twain tradition. Teachout provides a nice balance of the personal and the public man (using previously unpublished letters and journal entries) so that it is often the case that Mencken's own words indict him (rather than the P.C. crowd taking things out of context). What we are left with is a man still worthy of admiration (at the very least, for a journalistic style that is unrivaled), but one who deserves to be further scrutinized for his contradictions. Bravo, Teachout, for giving us a living, breathing Mencken rather than a caricature.