Author describes the influence of Mencken and the "American mercury" in the 1920's.

In 1939 Frank Luther Mott received a Pulitzer Prize for Volumes II and III of his History of American Magazines. In 1958 he was awarded the Bancroft Prize for Volume IV. He was at work on Volume V of the projected six-volume history when he died in October 1964. He had, at that time, written the sketches of the twenty-one magazines that appear in this volume. These magazines flourished during the period 1905-1930, but their "biographies" are continued throughout their entire lifespan--in the case of the ten still published, to recent years. Mott's daughter, Mildred Mott Wedel, has prepared this volume for publication and provided notes on changes since her father's death. No one has attempted to write the general historical chapters the author provided in the earlier volumes but which were not yet written for this last volume. A delightful autobiographical essay by the author has been included, and there is a detailed cumulative index to the entire set of this monumental work. The period 1905-1930 witnessed the most flamboyant and fruitful literary activity that had yet occurred in America. In his sketches, Mott traces the editorial partnership of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, first on The Smart Set and then in the pages of The American Mercury. He treats The New Republic, the liberal magazine founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly and Willard Straight; the conservative Freeman; and Better Homes and Gardens, the first magazine to achieve a circulation of one million "without the aid of fiction or fashions." Other giants of magazine history are here: we see "serious, shaggy...solid, pragmatic, self-contained" Henry Luce propel a national magazine called Time toward its remarkable prosperity. In addition to those already mentioned, the reader will find accounts of The Midland, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The Little Review, Poetry, The Fugitive, Everybody's, Appleton's Booklovers Magazine, Current History, Editor & Publisher, The Golden Book Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Hampton's Broadway Magazine, House Beautiful, Success, and The Yale Review.

Over a career that spanned half of a century, Henry Louis Mencken published more than 10 million words. More than a million were written about him, many of which, Mencken liked to remark, were highly condemnatory. He was called, with good reason, the most powerful private citizen in America during the 1920s.This lively introduction to Mencken's life and work begins with a concise biographical portrait before proceeding to a consideration of the five major periods of the renowned Baltimorean's career: his literary apprenticeship; the growth of his national reputation; his fame and unprecedented popularity during the 1920s (when college students would flash the Paris-green cover of the American Mercury as a badge of sophistication); the decline of his reputation during the Depression; and his renewed popularity during the 1940s, with the publication of his autobiographical trilogy, the Days books. In discussing this varied career, Vincent Fitzpatrick touches upon all the roles that Mencken played: journalist; editor; redoubtable critic of literature, culture, and politics; philologist; and autobiographer. Drawing upon Mencken's extensive correspondence of more than 100,000 letters, the book stresses his unflagging belief in the need for free speech (up to the limits of common decency). Indeed, in the end Mencken proved a significant American civil libertarian.Iconoclast, critic, satirist, "individualist," H. L. Mencken offered unique insights into American life. His lifelong celebration of the freedom to dissent marks his most enduring contribution to a nation that gave him such a wealth of material and so much delight.

Here is the definitive biography of Mencken, the most illuminating book ever published about this giant of American letters. We see the prominent role he played in the Scopes Monkey Trial, his long crusade against Prohibition, his fierce battles against press censorship, and his constant exposure of pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining the shape of American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes.

H. L. Mencken's diary was, at his own request, kept sealed in the vaults of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library for a quarter of a century after his death. The diary covers the years 1930 -- 1948, and provides a vivid, unvarnished, sometimes shocking picture of Mencken himself, his world, and his friends and antagonists, from Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner to Franklin D. Roosevelt, for whom Mencken nourished a hatred that resulted in spectacular and celebrated feats of invective. From the more than 2,000 pages of typescript that have now come to light, the Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher has made a generous selection of entries carefully chosen to preserve the whole range, color, and impact of the diary. Here, full scale, is Mencken the unique observer and disturber of American society. And here too is Mencken the human being of wildly contradictory impulses: the skeptic who was prey to small superstitions, the dare-all warrior who was a hopeless hypochondriac, the loving husband and generous friend who was, alas, a bigot. Mencken emerges from these pages unretouched -- in all the often outrageous gadfly vitality that made him, at his brilliant best, so important to the intellectual fabric of American life