1 option
The skeptic : a life of H.L. Mencken / Terry Teachout.
LIBRA - Athenaeum of Philadelphia Circulating PS3525.E43 Z84 2002
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Teachout, Terry.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956.
- Mencken, H. L.
- Authors, American--20th century--Biography.
- Authors, American.
- Journalists--United States--Biography.
- Journalists.
- United States.
- Editors--United States--Biography.
- Editors.
- Genre:
- Biographies.
- Authors' inscriptions (Provenance)
- Physical Description:
- xv, 410 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : HarperCollinsPublishers, [2002]
- Summary:
- When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the "booboisie." Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him. Now Terry Teachout takes on the man Edmund Wilson called "our greatest practicing literary journalist," brilliantly capturing all of Mencken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped.
- Contents:
- Prologue: "A Permanent Opposition" 1
- 1 "I'd Have Butchered Beautifully" Birth of a Bourgeois, 1880-1899 19
- 2 "A Sort of Celestial Call" Reporter and Editor, 1899-1906 46
- 3 "Wider and Lusher Fields" Columnist and Critic, 1906-1914 77
- 4 "The Puritans Have All the Cards" At the Smart Set, 1915-1918 111
- 5 "Don't Wait Until the Firemen Arrive" Becoming a Legend, 1918-1923 143
- 6 "I am my Own Party" At the American Mercury, 1924-1928 187
- 7 "I Discern no Tremors" Marriage and the Crash, 1929-1935 240
- 8 "We'll Even it Up" The Age of Roosevelt II, 1935-1941 276
- 9 "It Will Become Infamous to Doubt" Skeptic in Exile, 1942-1948 298
- 10 "Until Thought and Memory Adjourn" Scourge at Bay, 1948-1956 316
- Epilogue: "Quacks and Swindlers, Fools and Knaves" 331.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliograpical references (pages [351]-398) and index.
- Local Notes:
- Athenaeum's copy inscribed by author.
- ISBN:
- 0060505281
- 006050529X
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.