Prejudices, Second Series

H.L. Mencken was the most dangerous critic in American letters, and Prejudices is where he kept his arsenal. This Second Series, published in 1920, collects essays that slice through the comfortable lies Americans tell themselves about their culture, their democracy, and their literature. Mencken attacks with a wit that still cuts a century later. He dismantles the nation's sacred cows, democracy, puritanism, capitalism, the booboisie, with a precision that leaves nothing standing. He saves particular scorn for American literature, which he regarded as a swamp of mediocrity, and for California, which he called a place where any man who reads fifty good books stands out 'brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.' But his real target is intellectual complacency itself: the refusal to think honestly, to demand more from oneself and one's society. These essays aren't period pieces. They're a weapon against every age's tendency to confuse comfort with truth. Read them if you enjoy having your assumptions demolished with ferocious style.