Few writers roiled the American cultural scene like Henry Louis Mencken.
Pathbreaking journalist, trenchant social observer, and unbridled
humorist, Mencken was the most provocative and influential cultural
critic of the last century. To read him today is to be plunged into an
era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as our own, in the
company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness. In
the six volumes of Prejudices published between 1919 and 1927, Mencken
attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and
championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and
maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play,
Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a
staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism,
politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and
painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of
American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New
York. Now, The Library of America restores the full text of Mencken's
landmark work to print in a deluxe two- volume boxed set, ensuring that
new generations of readers can rediscover his one-of-a-kind genius.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
