[bleudevil]

I love it! I just discovered the Chrestomathy and read it cover to cover. I'm now reading the second one. Amazing how many of his observations apply to today. Like a nice cold gulp of pure spring water to wash away the taste of saccharine. And he wrote a lot of this stuff in a newspaper column - can't see that happening today. Makes me happy to see that other Freepers enjoy his stuff.

[BluesDuke]

I have been a Mencken fan since college years, when I stumbled on a copy of the original Chrestomathy. My library once included original editions of Prejudices: First Series, A Book of Prefaces, The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and Bravos, A Carnival of Buncombe, The Days of H.L. Mencken, and Minority Report; those books were lost with only too many others of mine in flood damage four years ago. I now have a fresh copy of the first Chrestomathy, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, The Impossible H.L. Mencken (a fat volume of his newspaper writings, including the pieces covering the Scopes trial which Mencken more famously whittled into his notorious elegy for William Jennings Bryan), Prejudices: A Selection, and H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism. I hunt the used bookstores regularly in search of the older volumes I lost, too.

As for seeing writing of the like of Mr. Mencken in the newspapers today, rotsa ruck. Had he been starting his career today, Mencken would be dismissed as too opaquely impossible by editors who can barely parse Fun with Dick and Jane (the same could likely be said of such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Murray Kempton - who actually served as Mencken's page during the 1936 national conventions - Jim Murray, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Red Smith, among others).