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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 belles letteres. Still, the fact is that Mencken, more than any other writer, helped to create a sophisticated reading public and thereby pave the way for the literature that came into being in the years just before, during, and after World War I. He performed that service, in large part, as the book critic for the Smart Set magazine between November 1908 and December 1923 and as coeditor (with George Jean Nathan) of that journal for the last nine of those years. With the founding in January 1924 of the American Mercury, Mencken's influence as writer and editor increased dramatically--to the point where the New York Times referred to him in an editorial as "the most powerful private citizen in America." In 1926 journalist Walter Lippmann, who was probably second only to Mencken as an influence on the educated minority, called Mencken "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people." Nearly thirty years later newspaperman and playwright Ben Hecht echoed that appraisal when he referred to Mencken in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, as "The Republic's One-Man Renaissance." "No single American mind," Hecht wrote of his pessimistic hero, "has influenced existence in the Republic as much as did his.
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