H L MENCKEN SIGNED LETTER with ENVELOPE—Critic•Humorist•American Language

Description: SIGNED LETTER WITH ENVELOPE Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature — his was the first book on Shaw — music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term "Menckenian" has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.Mencken opposed the American entry into World War I and World War II. Some of the opinions in his private diary entries have been described by some researchers as racist and anti-Semitic, although this characterization has been disputed. Larry S. Gibson argued that Mencken's views on race changed significantly between his early and later writings, and that it was more accurate to describe Mencken as elitist rather than racist. He seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he wrote, "because it is honest; it admits the central fact of human nature.... A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid." His longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House. His papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. Sara (Haardt) MenckenIn 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a German American professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author eighteen years his junior. Haardt had led an unsuccessful effort in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment. The two met in 1923, after Mencken delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations between the sexes, had gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me," Mencken said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one." Even more startling, he was marrying an Alabama native, despite his having written scathing essays about the American South. Haardt was in poor health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken. He had always championed her writing and, after her death, had a collection of her short stories published under the title Southern Album. Great Depression, war, and afterwardDuring the Great Depression, Mencken did not support the New Deal, which cost him popularity, as did his strong reservations regarding U.S. participation in World War II, and his overt contempt for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He ceased writing for The Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing on his memoirs and other projects as editor while he served as an adviser for the paper that had been his home for nearly his entire career. In 1948, he briefly returned to the political scene to cover the presidential election in which President Harry S. Truman faced Republican Thomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party. His later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays that were first published in The New Yorker and then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days. Books Ventures into Verse (1903)George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)The Gist of Nietzsche (1910)What You Ought to Know about your Baby (1910)Men versus the Man (1910)The Artist: A Drama Without Words (1912)Europe After 8:15 (1914)A Book of Burlesques (1916)A Little Book in C Major (1916)The Creed of a Novelist (1916)Pistols for Two (1917)A Book of Prefaces (1917)In Defense of Women (1918)Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)The American Language (1919)Prejudices (1919–27)First Series (1919)Second Series (1920)Third Series (1922)Fourth Series (1924)Fifth Series (1926)Sixth Series (1927)Selected Prejudices (1927)Heliogabalus (A Buffoonery in Three Acts) (1920)The American Credo (1920)Notes on Democracy (1926)Menckeneana: A Schimpflexikon (1928) Treatise on the Gods (1930)Making a President (1932)Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940)Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941) 65 A New Dictionary of Quotations (1942)Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943)Christmas Story (1944)The American Language, Supplement I (1945)The American Language, Supplement II (1948)A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949) Posthumous collectionsMinority Report (1956)On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1956)The American Scene (1965),.The Bathtub Hoax & Other Blasts & Bravos (1958)A Gang of Pecksniffs (1975)The Impossible H.L. Mencken (1991)My Life As Author and Editor (1992)A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1994) Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work (1996)A Religious Orgy in Tennessee (2006) INSURED MEDIA MAIL BOXED SHIPPINGWITHIN TWO BUSINESS DAYS OF PAYMENT

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Location: Chicago, Illinois

End Time: 2024-09-12T17:28:44.000Z

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