MP3 CD Format<\/b><\/p> Edited and annotated by H. L. M., this is a selection from his out\-of\-print writings. They come mostly from books\x26#8212;the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques<\/em>, In Defense of Women<\/em>, Notes on Democracy<\/em>, Making a President<\/em>, A Book of Calumny<\/em>, Treatise on Right and Wrong<\/em>\x26#8212;but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury<\/em>, the Smart Set<\/em>, and the Baltimore Evening Sun<\/em>) and some notes that were never previously published at all.<\/p> Listeners will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans\x26#8212;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.<\/p> "The culling of the best, the choicest passages, from the famous Prejudices, which in their day made Mencken leader of the iconoclasts, shocker of the conservatives, and favorite of the younger generation." -- "Kirkus Reviews" H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), Baltimore journalist, critic, and essayist, began his career on local newspapers in 1899, becoming a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, and later joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun , for which he worked throughout most of his life. He became literary critic of the Smart Set in 1908, and was coeditor of this lively periodical with George Jean Nathan. Mencken and Nathan also founded the American Mercury in 1924, which Mencken edited until 1933. Mencken is best known for the aggressive iconoclasm of his editorial policies in these magazines, especially during the decade following World War I, when he exhibited a savagely satirical reaction against the political and cultural imperfections of the time.