Author Topic: A Taste of Vintage Mencken  (Read 6652 times)

Joe Carillo

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A Taste of Vintage Mencken
« on: May 22, 2009, 08:49:03 PM »
If you are a serious student of English, particularly if you aspire to become a professional writer, I think you’d need to get more than just a taste of H. L. Mencken. Known as the “Sage of Baltimore,” Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) is considered one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century. He was a truly multifaceted writer—a journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic of the American way of life. And he was himself a serious student of English, writing in the process The American Language, a study in several volumes on how English is spoken in the United States.



You may not always agree with his strong and often heady opinions but I’m sure you’d be spellbound by the vaulting majesty of his English prose. Read and ponder this brief passage from his 1918 classic, In Defense of Women:

“Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to down right homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.”

Mencken is known to have gathered material for In Defense of Women not from libraries and universities but from saloons and hotels, and some biographers consider it “not so much a defense of women as a critique of the relationship between the sexes.” In any case, it earned him an equivocal reputation as either a great defender of women’s rights or America’s “high-priest of woman-haters.”

Read “In Defense of Women” by H. L. Mencken in an easy-to-read manuscript format

Read the full text of H. L. Mencken’s “In Defense of Women”

Read a biographical tribute to H. L. Mencken
in “C-SPAN American Writers II: The 20th Century”

Read the Encyclopedia of World Biography’s assessment of H. L. Mencken

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What do you think of H. L. Mencken’s ideas on women? Click the Reply button to post your thoughts on Jose Carillo’s English Forum.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2017, 12:02:47 AM by Joe Carillo »

Arvin Ortiz

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Re: A Taste of Vintage Mencken
« Reply #1 on: May 23, 2009, 11:02:45 AM »
As it happens, H.L. Mencken's column, "The Free Lance," inspired me to name my blog (arvinantoniospeaks.wordpress.com) as "The Free Lancer." I also adopted his credo: "I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant."

Joe Carillo

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Re: A Taste of Vintage Mencken
« Reply #2 on: May 23, 2009, 12:56:35 PM »
That's good to know, Arvin! I'll look up your website right after this.

Have a nice day!