Prejudices, Fifth Series

Here is a man who called America "the great boob-town" and meant it with every scintillating sentence. The Fifth Series finds H.L. Mencken at the height of his powers, dismantling the sacred cows of 1920s America with the precision of a surgeon and the glee of a anarchist. He takes on Prohibition (the "dry millennium" of his famous essay), smashes the pretense of Southern culture, anatomizes the worship of Theodore Roosevelt, and pens an unforgiving meditation on death that leaves no romantic illusions intact. But beneath the savagery lies a genuine defender of intellectual freedom, a man who believed Americans deserved better than the puritanical hypocrisy they had chosen for themselves. Mencken's prose crackles with verbal invention, Latinate flourishes, and a contempt for stupidity that feels almost holy. This is criticism as performance art, as polemic, as blood sport. Read it if you want to understand why Edmund Wilson called him the only American with real courage.