A Historical Treasure: the never-before, published diary of the most outspoken, iconoclastic, ferociously articulate of American social critics -- the sui generis newspaperman, columnist for the Baltimore Sun, editor of The American Mercury, and author of The American Language, who was admired, feared, and famous for his merciless puncturing of smugness, his genius for deflating pomposity and pretense, his polemical brilliance. Walter Lippmann called him, in 1926, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated Americans." H. L. Mencken's diary was, at his own request, kept sealed in the vaults of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library for a quarter of a century after his death. The diary covers the years 1930 -- 1948, and provides a vivid, unvarnished, sometimes shocking picture of Mencken himself, his world, and his friends and antagonists, from Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner to Franklin D. Roosevelt, for whom Mencken nourished a hatred that resulted in spectacular and celebrated feats of invective. From the more than 2,000 pages of typescript that have now come to light, the Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher has made a generous selection of entries carefully chosen to preserve the whole range, color, and impact of the diary. Here, full scale, is Mencken the unique observer and disturber of American society. And here too is Mencken the human being of wildly contradictory impulses: the skeptic who was prey to small superstitions, the dare-all warrior who was a hopeless hypochondriac, the loving husband and generous friend who was, alas, a bigot. Mencken emerges from these pages unretouched -- in all the often outrageous gadfly vitality that made him, at his brilliant best, so important to the intellectual fabric of American life. This is about one-third of the diary that Mencken kept from 1930 to 1948, with some marginal explanatory notes by Mencken scholar Fecher. The diary, which was sealed by Mencken's request for 25 years, reveals Mencken's daily thoughts about his activities and friends, as well as his attitudes and biases. Some insights into the literary world and the literary greats of the day may be gleaned here, but there is not much about Mencken's journalism career. Mencken followers will find the diary selections interesting, although not particularly revealing. As Fecher notes, the diary is "perfectly consistent with all the other Menckens of fact and legend." For literature, social history, and larger journalism collections. - Abraham Z. Bass, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. About H. L. Mencken "If Mencken had never lived, it would have taken a whole army of assorted philosophers, monologists, editors and patrons of the new writing to make up for him. As it was, he not only rallied all the young writers together and imposed his skepticism upon the new generation, but also brought a new and uproarious gift for high comedy into a literature that had never been too quick to laugh." Alfred Kazin "Mencken came in like a lion. Like a revolutionary, overthrowing half the props that supported America's conception of itself -- and not merely its beliefs and moralities, but its peace of mind." Louis kronenberger "He was vastly underrated as a humorist with one deadly sensible eye on the behavior of the human animal. He was, in fact, a humorist by instinct and a superb craftsman by temperament." Alistair Cooke Treasure: the never-before, published diary of the most outspoken, iconoclastic, ferociously articulate of American social critics -- the sui generis newspaperman, columnist for the Baltimore Sun, editor of The American Mercury, and author of The American Language, who was admired, feared, and famous for his merciless puncturing of smugness, his genius for deflating pomposity and pretense, his polemical brilliance. Walter Lippmann called him, in 1926, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated Americans." H. L. Mencken's diary was, at his own request, kept sealed in the vaults of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library for a quarter of a century after his death. The diary covers the years 1930 -- 1948, and provides a vivid, unvarnished, sometimes shocking picture of Mencken himself, his world, and his friends and antagonists, from Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner to Franklin D. Roosevelt, for whom Mencken nouris About H. L. Mencken "If Mencken had never lived, it would have taken a whole army of assorted philosophers, monologists, editors and patrons of the new writing to make up for him. As it was, he not only rallied all the young writers together and imposed his skepticism upon the new generation, but also brought a new and uproarious gift for high comedy into a literature that had never been too quick to laugh." Alfred Kazin "Mencken came in like a lion. Like a revolutionary, overthrowing half the props th