During a career that encompassed several roles and lasted for nearly fifty years, Henry Louis Mencken was above all else a libertarian. He saw freedom of speech as the most valuable attribute of any society, and he insisted, throughout some long and...

During his lifetime H. L. Mencken was called the Great Iconoclast and the Sage of Baltimore, appellations he gained because of his journalistic writing in newspapers and magazines. However, his contributions to American letters were more extensive than...

During his lifetime H. L. Mencken was called the Great Iconoclast and the Sage of Baltimore, appellations he gained because of his journalistic writing in newspapers and magazines. However, his contributions to American letters were more extensive than...

Although he was for nearly two decades America's most powerful and influential literary critic, having become in the early 1920s the first (and, for that matter, last) literary dictator, H. L. Mencken is not generally remembered for his criticism of...

Of German-American descent, Henry Louis Mencken was born on 12 September 1880, in Baltimore, Maryland, where he lived all his life, most of it in the same house. His prosperous, conservative family was in the tobacco trade, and he took just pride in...

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an American journalist, editor, critic, and philologist. Though he was not a distinguished stylist, the extraordinary vigor of his expression was memorable. The first American to be widely read as a critic was H. L....