AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – Writer, editor, philologist, social critic, and Baltimore native H. L. Mencken was born on September 12, 1880. Mencken, who generated a strong literary following in Baltimore during the 1920s and 1930s, was best known for his scathing social commentary, critical support of emerging writers, and for his scholarly understanding of American usage of the English language.

H. L. Mencken, Critic of the American “Booboisie”

Mencken first reported for the Baltimore Herald, eventually becoming editor-in-chief and later for the Baltimore Sun. While with the Sun, he was given his column, The Free Lance, with which he began to make his name as a writer, cultural critic, and provocateur. He was also hired to write book reviews for a New York monthly magazine, The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, of which he ultimately became the co-editor with the drama critic George Jean Nathan from 1914 to 1923. Mencken left The Smart Set with Nathan to establish the American Mercury in 1924.

Literary criticism enjoyed something of a heyday during the first half of the twentieth century, and Mencken was one of its most forceful practitioners. As a literary critic, he lent critical support to the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and others.

Mencken’s popularity waned in the 1930s during the Great Depression and resulting New Deal efforts to salvage the U.S. economy, although he remained an active, irreverent, and prolific writer. His reputation recovered somewhat in the 1940s, with the publication of a series of memoirs. Thirty-five years after Mencken’s death in 1956, in accordance with the terms of his will, a number of the author’s unpublished works were published, bringing him back to contemporary notice.

In 1919, Mencken published the first edition of his major contribution to philology, The American Language, in which he attempted to analyze the words and phrases, expressions, idioms, and peculiarities of pronunciation and spelling that might be termed “Americanisms” – manifestations of the English language that were uniquely “American.” Mencken revised this seminal work several times throughout his lifetime. This scholarly study, enlivened by Mencken’s particular wit, remains a classic in its field. Mencken coined the term “booboisie” —a combination of the words boob and bourgeoisie–by which he meant the ignorant and uncultured middle class.

Learn More

• Listen to an Interview with H.L. Mencken from the American Folklife Center’s American English Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection. Read a copy of the transcription.
• Search Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers on H.L. Mencken or Henry Mencken to find references in historic newspapers to the early years of Mencken’s career.

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