Criticism For Mencken (Wilson)
"The striking things about Mencken's mind are its ruthlessness and its rigidity. It has all the courage in the world in a country where courage is rare. He has even had the fearlessness to avoid the respectable and the wholesome; those two devils which so often betray in the end even the most intelligent of Americans. He fought outspokenly against optimism, Puritanism and democratic ineptitude, at a time when they had but few foes. It is well to remember, now that these qualities have become stock reproaches among the intelligentsia, that it was Mencken who began the crusade against them at a lonely and disregarded post and that we owe to him much of the disfavor into which they have recently fallen..."
Short Biography
Influenced
(Wilson) and (Fitzgerald)
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal)
- Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy)
- Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt)
- George Jean Nathan
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
- Eugene O’Neill (Play Write)
- James Joyce (Finnigan's Wake)
- Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
- James Weldon Johnson (Civil Rights Activist)
- Langston Hughes (The Harlem Renaissance Writer)
- ANd MANY more
Main Rhetorical Strategies
(Jezioro) and (Wilson)
- Repetition: "never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men; there are no women"
- Allusions: "Bonaparte had it; Geothe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to believed"
- Parallelism: "Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illlusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class"
- Henry Louis Mencken
- Lived in Baltimore, Maryland
- Buried in Loudon Park Cemetery
- Location of grave: N 39° 16.693′ W 76° 40.683′ (39.278217°, -76.678050°)
- Grave side memorial services on January 25th for the past ten years
- Very close friends with Clarence Darrow
- Considered to be one of the most influential writers ever
Time Period:
- 1900-1950
- Represented the time period through:
- Topics: Political issues
- Writing style: Formal, Educated
- Transcended the time period by:
- Looking into political and social issues that were before the time
Issues included:
- Equality for ALL
- Women's Rights
- Civil Rights
- Gay Rights
- Changes in the political and social systems
Excerpt from In The Defense of Women (1918)
"...'Human creatures,' says George, borrowing from Weininger, 'are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men; there are no women, but only sexual majorities.' Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Geothe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to believed, it amounted to down right homosexuality... The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truely lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and caricature of God."
("No Army")
Excerpt from "Darrow's Eloquent Appeal Wasted on Ears That Only Heed Bryan, Says Mencken" (1925)
("2015 Mencken")
"I sincerely hope that the nobility and gentry of the lowlands will not make the colossal mistake of viewing this trial of Scopes as a trivial farce. Full of rustic japes and in bad taste, it is, to be sure, somewhat comic on the surface. One laughs to see lawyers sweat. The jury, marched down Broadway, would set New York by the ears. But all of that is only skin deep."
Background on The Scopes Monkey Trial
- Prosecutor: Bryan and Stewart
- Defense: Clarence Darrow
- Mencken was co-council
- One of the most controversial test cases ever
- Everything was planned before Scopes was arrested
- Teaching Evolution in schools in Tennessee
H.L. Mencken
12 September 1880-
29 January 1956