E-Book Overview
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.
In 1956, Mencken read through his notebooks and extracted those pieces he thought truest, most pertinent, most precise, or most likely to blow the dust out of a reader's brain.
E-Book Content
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BOOKS BY H. L. Mencken
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE the American language: Supplement One
the American language: Supplement Two
HAPPY DAYS
which, taken together,
NEWSPAPER DAYS
HEATHEN DAYS A
constitute
the days
OF
MENCKEN
H.
L.
NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
TREATISE ON THE GODS
CHRISTMAS STORY A
MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (with selections from the Prejudices lesques,
In Defense of
Women,
series,
A
Book
of Bur-
Notes on Democracy,
Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong, with pieces from the American Mercury, Smart Set, and Baltimore Evening Sun, and some previously unpublished notes)
minority report: H.
L.
Menckens Notebooks
These are Borzoi Books published by Alfred A. Knopf in
new york
MINORITY REPORT H. L. Menckens Notebooks
MINORITY REPORT H. L. Mencken's Notebooks
1956
ALFRED A KNOPF •
•
NEW YORK
L. C. catalog card number: 56-jjij
©
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, part of this book in writing
may be reproduced
in
Inc. All rights reserved.
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
brief passages in a review to be printed in a
Manufactured ously in
No
any form without permission
in the
magazine or newspaper.
United States of America. Published simultane-
Canada by McClelland and Stewart Limited.
FIRST EDITION
PREFACE
This
is
made up of selecrandom from the memoranda
not a book, but a notebook.
tions chosen
more
or less at
It is
and embalming of ideas. Ever since my earliest attempts as an author I have followed the somewhat banal practise of setting down notions as they come to me, sometimes in the form of hasty scrawls, unintelligible to anyone else, and then throwing these notes into a bin. Out of that bin have come a couple of dozen books and pamphlets and an almost innumerable swarm of magazine and newspaper articles, but still the raw materials kept mounting faster than I could work them up, so I am printing herewith some select samof long years devoted to the pursuit, anatomizing
them, partly for the purpose of getting them off my hands and my conscience, and partly in the hope that some of them, at least, may enkindle an occasional reader to ples of
more orderly and profitable lucubrations. As I grow older I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme.
He
should have two at the lowest— one for observ-
ing and studying the world, and the other for formulating
and setting down his conclusions about it