H. L. Mencken

Prejudices: The Complete Series (boxed set)

H. L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness.

In the six volumes of Prejudices (1919–1927), Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken’s prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Irreverent portraits of such major contemporaries as Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and William Dean Howells contrast with explorations of fascinating byways of American culture in a time of tumultuous and often combative transition.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, volume editor, is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast and editor of Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters and The Impossible H. L. Mencken.

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Also of interest:
A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (2 volumes)
Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s
Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s

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