Reddit mentions of A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing

I've heard both George Bernard Shaw and Henry James (a friend of Wilde's) compared to him in a very positive way. I've never read Henry James but I've read several of Shaw's plays and would agree. I'd recommend getting a collection of his plays. The best ones I've read are "Man and Superman", "Heartbreak House" and "Pygmalion". As for the rest of the authors I'll mention... the similarity to Wilde may vary, some may even have very dark humor, but I find them all just as amusing (though perhaps in different ways).


Mark Twain has as many (maybe more because he was so prolific) hilarious one-liners and is overall filled with mordant observations. I'd recommend reading Huck Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Letters from the Earth and any of numerous collections of his short stories. I'm sure there's more by him to recommend but that's mostly what I've read. If you're fond of irreverence there's also some good collections of his writings about religion that are very amusing, but he pokes fun of every aspect of society.

P.G. Wodehouse is probably one of your favorite author's favorite authors. He's credited as Douglas Adams chief literary inspiration, and Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens have both written essays on how much they love him. I have collection called "The Most of P.G. Wodehouse" which is a great introduction to him, "Right Ho, Jeeves" and "The Code of the Woosters" are his most well known works. Also, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie starred in a show that adapted stories about two of his characters called "Jeeves and Wooster".

H.L. Mencken might be the most controversial one. Kurt Vonnegut said he was the closest America got to a second Mark Twain. Christopher Hitchens called him "a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, [...] an antihumanist [..], a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others".(replace German with American and I think Hitchens words apply to himself as well) I agree with them both, actually. I don't like his politics and some of what he says is downright cruel... but the guy knows how to write. He's genuinely funny, even when I disagree with him. The best books to start with for him are The Vintage Mencken and Chrestomathy



Others: Voltaire, (a collection of "Candide and other stories" is the best place to start with him), Jonathon Swift (Gulliver's Travels and any collection of his "best" works are the best place to start) Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide series and Dirk Gently series), Joseph Heller (Catch 22), John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces), and Kurt Vonnegut (Everything, starting with Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse 5).

Okay, that was probably a bit more than you were after, but I hope you find some things of value in it.

Lamentably I cannot go as in depth with this as I'd like to at the moment, being in the middle of a big move. Recently I (re)listened to the recorded interview of H. L. Mencken, taken to preserve the writer's voice and ad-lib wit for the Library of Congress' American Memory Project, as /u/caffarelli linked to in the thread's description. The LoC link is only an excerpt, but I found a youtube playlist that contains the interview in its entirety. This particular source is of interest, at least to me, as I believe it's the only recording of his voice that has been made and preserved for the public memory. While I am certainly critical in turn of a lot of the things that he had to say (though he was, of course, a product of his time), my connection to Mencken is one of fascination with his character, love of his wit and demeanor, and that he was instrumental to my own learning of sophisticated English (which is my second language).

I suspect there will be a few, particularly outside of the United States, who will not be very familiar with Mencken. Easily one of the most influential and lettered journalists and prose stylists of the twentieth century in the United States, Mencken was known for his blunt, verbose, and scathing essays and articles on American culture and politics, most notably during the 1920s and 1930s, with some significant output up until his death in 1956. Perhaps most famous for his lengthy history and analysis of The American Language and his reporting during the 1925 Scopes Trial (he coined the term "monkey trial"), he began his career with The Baltimore Herald and The Baltimore Sun, later wrote a little for The Smart Set (you'll hear his opinions on that in the interview), and founded The American Mercury with George Jean Nathan.

In the interview, you're going to hear some interesting opinions that Mencken had in regard to architectural and decorative aesthetics; living in Baltimore (he spent his entire life there); Baltimore journalism and the changes it underwent in his lifetime; his attitudes toward cigars, music, and religion; opinions on American politics and democratic government; his methods of coping with prohibition (he was fond of beer and drink of all type); and boxing.

Not one to eschew controversy, you're never going to hear a boring opinion written in one of Mencken's works. Critical of democracy for its entrustment of power to the plainfolk, who he believed acted often times in opposition to what he considered the "educated minority." Even so, he reveled in the American experience, thinking of its politics as "incomparably idiotic, and thus infinitely amusing"—"the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage." He was very scathing of populist movements, and perhaps the most derisive critic of William Jennings Bryan, whom he called "the indefatigable Jennings," going so far as to call Adolf Hitler "an Austrian William Jennings Bryan" (also referring to Hitler as "a Babbit run amok"). Immensely distrustful of such plainfolk, Mencken with no reservation voiced his opinions on the "booboisie," even in a mockery of poor literary education, translated the Declaration of Independence into simplified speech to be better understood by the masses of his time. One of his better known works, moreover, is "The Sahara of the Bozart," (PDF) a lengthy criticism of Southern culture prior to the Southern Renaissance (recommended from a literary perspective; its quality as a historical source is poor). Hyperbole was key to his writing; his criticisms always included it, and his less common advocacy of cultural elements he favored. He was not a strong advocate of objective journalism, and so his writing is as much a look into the person as they are the events he wrote about and the style he used. He's an excellent primary source, but not always one to help you negotiate your way to the facts. I know labor historians will certainly have some strong opinions on him due to his criticisms of Roosevelt and the New Deal. His idolization of German culture (though he despised National Socialism and the "thugs" that ran it) lost him a good amount of readership, though already well past the prime of his career.

I made a submission about this in /r/badhistory, but he also hoodwinked a great deal of reporters, historians, and the public with a short history of the bathtub in the United States, every word of which being a fabrication. The misinformation that Mencken provided went on to be printed in reputable publication as actual fact, though Mencken only sought to demonstrate how susceptible so many were to readily accept, without question, propaganda during WWI (doing so very successfully, might I add). He made an official retraction in 1926, but this did not necessarily stop the work being used as factual source material.

Again, this write up does not do justice as even a short biography of the man, so due to time constraints I'll live some further sources for anyone interested to look for in the library:

For his writings:

A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949)

Prejudices: A Selection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)

Damn! A Book of Calumny

The American Language

A good biography:

Teachout, T. The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (NY: Harper Collins, 2002)

Sorry some of the links above are a bit bizarre. I have all his writings in print, and tried to throw in some ways for anyone interested to easily and cheaply access some of his writing.

> Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged … Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can’t fulfill – that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope? Answer: may be for a few weeks at the start…. But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest … They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n. In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes. They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho. Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves. The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.

H. L. Mencken