Word: mencken
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...terror of teetotalers and the debunker of American myths, Mencken was the most famous journalist of his time. Known for his biting commentary, the Baltimore-based writer combined a lifelong interest in the uniquely American forms of the English language with an abiding concern about the public issues...
...Diary of H.L. Mencken...
...Mencken's diary--just released this year after decades of languishing, unread, in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library--is not really about politics. Or about the writer's craft. Or even about the inner life of the writer himself...
...Mencken, the iconoclastic journalist who delighted in debunking the "booboisie," is being debunked himself. An abridged version of his diaries will arrive in bookstores this month. In journal entries written between 1930 and 1948, Mencken emerges as a hypochondriac with an anti-Semitic streak. In one passage he noted that a house on his street had been bought by "some Jews . . . with various ratty tenants." In a segment that the editor omitted, Mencken referred to two Baltimore businessmen as "dreadful kikes...
...Mencken ordered that the diaries be sealed for 25 years after his death, which occurred in 1956, and thereafter be made available to students only. But in 1985 the Maryland Attorney General ruled the restriction not legally binding. Mencken would probably have put down controversy over the diaries to what he called "the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation." But admirers of Mencken's wit may now find it harder to laugh with...