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.