Prejudices, First Series

H.L. Mencken was the great contrarian of American letters, and this 1919 collection announces his program with gleeful ferocity. Here he dismantles the pretensions of American culture, literary and otherwise, with an elegance that makes outrage feel like entertainment. The essays range from scalding portraits of specific writers to broadsides against what he called boobus Americanus, the mass of middle-class citizens he despised for their cultural timidity and moral cant. What makes these pieces endure is not merely their wit, though the wit is spectacular, but their passionate argument that criticism should be honest, personal, and unafraid of offense. Mencken rejects the notion that art must serve morality; he demands it serve only art itself. For readers weary of tepid cultural commentary, these essays remain a bracing provocation nearly a century later... a bitter pill that tastes strangely like freedom.