A Mencken Chrestomathy
About this audiobook
Edited and annotated by H. L. M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books—the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong—but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all.
Listeners will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.
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About the author
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, satirist, and scholar. He began his career on local newspapers in 1899, becoming a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald and then serving on the staff of the Baltimore Sun. He is best known for the aggressive iconoclasm of his editorial policies, challenging cherished beliefs and institutions. The term “Menckenian” has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.
Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
