A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing - Softcover

Mencken, H.L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394752090 ISBN 13: 9780394752099

Publisher: Vintage, 1982

Synopsis

Edited and annotated by H.L.M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books—the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong—but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all. 

Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.

About this title

Review:

A choice selection of H.L. Mencken's previously out-of-print writings. Highly recommended!

From the Back Cover:

In my title I revive the word chrestomathy in its true sense of 'a collection of choice passages from an author or authors, ' and ignore the late edition of 'especially one complied to assist in the acquirement of a language.' In the latter significance the term is often used by linguists, and some of the chrestomathies issued by them in recent years.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0394752090
• ISBN 13: 9780394752099
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 627