Mencken: The American Iconoclast.

Mencken: The American Iconoclast. By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 662. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-507238-3.)

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers's biography of Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), the Baltimore journalist and author, is the third to appear in the past twelve years. The prologue to this one gives us Mencken at his peak of popularity, in 1926, when as editor of the American Mercury he faced down the censors of the New England Watch and Ward Society to the cheers of Harvard undergraduates. By contrast, the prologue to Terry Teachout's The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (New York, 2002), recounts Franklin D. Roosevelt's skewering of Mencken, his implacable critic, with his own words at the 1934 Gridiron Club dinner. Mencken's reputation encompasses both the gleeful mocker of American democracy in the 1920s and the bitter polemicist thundering against the New Deal in the 1930s. Rodgers acknowledges "[t]hat he was a man of maddening contradictions," but, as the setting of her prologue in 1926 suggests, this is a sympathetic biography (p. 552).

Rodgers is well prepared. She edited Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt (New York, 1987). Haardt, an Alabama-born writer and a teacher at Goucher College, Rodgers's alma mater, married Mencken in 1930. She died in 1935, a loss from which Mencken never recovered. Rodgers also warmed up for the biography with The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories (New York, 1991). An assiduous researcher, she traveled to sixty archives and conducted numerous interviews; her bibliography cites titles of some two hundred magazines and newspapers.

Mencken blessed his biographers with plenty. He wrote for newspapers and magazines; he wrote letters, sometimes a hundred a day; and he wrote books. His vigorous prose--amusing, hyperbolic, and full of fiber--invites quotation, although Rodgers mixes his words judiciously with those of his contemporaries to create her portrait. Following a massive stroke in 1948, which cruelly diminished his power to read and write, Mencken organized his papers and prepared a schedule for them to be opened posthumously. Literary correspondence came out first in 1971. Other materials, including his correspondence with Sara Haardt, became available in 1981. Additional unpublished autobiographical materials opened in 1991.

Rodgers has used all these riches to craft a detailed narrative of Mencken's life. At the beginning she proposes that his less-known private life as "a citizen of Baltimore" is a key to understanding Mencken, for he "viewed the world through the prism of his city" (pp. 13, 381). She sets the boy in his Baltimore upbringing, reveals the young journalist discovering the vastness of his talent, exposes the commitment-averse serial lover, and treats the highlights of his career. We see Mencken, editor of The Smart Set and then of the American Mercury, championing new authors. A chapter tells how Mencken famously went to Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 to cover the Scopes Trial and the last days of William Jennings Bryan. There are his quadrennial trips to report on the national party conventions as well as the many quiet evenings at home. Books get written, and Mencken's reputation rises, falls, and rises again.

Mencken's biographers must also grapple with the prejudices of the man who published six volumes of essays entitled Prejudices (New York, 1919-1927). In particular, a diary kept from 1930 to 1948, opened in 1981 and published to controversy in 1989, reveals him an anti-Semite. As do Mencken's other post-diary autobiographers, Rodgers acknowledges his regular disparagement of Jews, because, she observes, he also "seemed to be most fascinated by Jews" (p. 396). Just as in the differences between opinions he expressed about blacks and his actual relationships with black writers, she argues, Mencken "demonstrated a greater appreciation than anyone might have thought" (p. 552).

Mencken's experience of censorship and surveillance during World War I for his pro-German views made him very angry, an anger that fueled his outspoken public expressions of the 1920s. As the battle in Boston in 1926 showed, it also made him brave and not a little stubborn. His recall of World War I caused him to play down the misdeeds of the Nazis in the 1930s and, deservedly, to experience public criticism and self-silencing in World War II. Rodgers's command of her materials makes this a convincing biography of a supreme iconoclast, whose "great contribution was his courage to write what he thought" (p. 552).

JOHN T. KNEEBONE

Virginia Commonwealth University