Of German-American descent, Henry Louis Mencken was born on 12 September 1880, in Baltimore, Maryland, where he lived all his life, most of it in the same house. His prosperous, conservative family was in the tobacco trade, and he took just pride in his ancestral line of European professors and lawyers. When he was nine he was playing the piano and had discovered Huckleberry Finn, a book he never ceased to celebrate and to claim as a personal influence. During his ten years of formal schooling, he became a voracious, systematic reader in all subjects. In 1899 he began his journalistic career as a reporter at the Baltimore Herald as morning editor. By 1903, at the age of twenty-three, he was city editor of that paper. In 1906 Mencken left the Herald to become editor of the Baltimore Sun; he retained a lifelong connection with the Sunpapers as writer and member of the...