Word: mencken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diary, Mencken tells the story of this group--his interactions with them, their personal foibles, their hypocrisies, and his fascination with all of the above. He recounts anecdotes about his friends and enemies with equal glee--one moment excoriating Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald as washed-up old drunks, the next extolling their work...
...fascinated with his own insider status, and the diary at times reads like a "Who's Who" of American politics, literature, medicine and academia. Despite the fact that Mencken ordered the diary sealed after his death, these are very much the public reminiscences of a very public...
...text of the diary--Mencken the man--is harder to decode. Though the one-time founder and editor of the American Mercury was a literary critic who prided himself on sifting through other writers' pomposity, he seemed to find his own methods of criticism strangely removed from his life. Rarely does he present in the diary the introspective or self-critical ponderings that mark so many other diaries...
...picture of Mencken, albeit an often self-contradictory one, does emerge in the pages of this record of his life from 1930 to 1948. Mencken, as he wrote in this most private of forums, was a husband proud of his solicitousness and a hypochondriac; a wealthy man obsessed by money; a writer intrigued by the failings of his colleagues and competitors...
...Mencken was really a man of his times, and despite his reputation as a vitriolic critic of American hypocrisy and greed, he shared more than a little intellectual common ground with those who perpetuated a status quo based on race, class, gender and religious bias...