With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. Discovered among his private papers and edited by columnist Terry Teachout, this collection is full of the iconoclastic common sense that marked Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. This chrestomathy ("a collection of literary passages") incorporates writings about a variety of subjects: politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, and the brethren of the cloth.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

About the Author
Terry Teachout is a journalist and critic whose biography of Mencken, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, was published in 2002. Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1880 and remained a lifelong resident. Opinionated and controversial, he wrote columns for the Baltimore Evening Sun that earned him a national reputation. He died in 1956.


Book Information
ISBN 9780801885495
Author H. L. Mencken
Format Paperback
Page Count 528
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 590g