"H.L. Mencken the Journalist" (1991) Summary and Analysis

Although Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken's views would probably make him politically and socially "incorrect" in today's world, he was an exemplar of the old-style newspaper journalist that swaggered through the American scene "from century's turn to mid-century's television," Vidal observes. A cigar-chomping, outspoken German-American who looked like a vaudeville figure, Mencken wrote for the Baltimore Sun for a half-century; his beat was America. Mencken "described the show. He reveled in absurdity; found no bonnet entirely bee-less. He loved the national bores for their own sweet sake."

Mencken wrote during a time when there was still a public educational system and "the average person could probably get through a newspaper without numb lips," Vidal says. "Today, half the American population no longer reads newspapers; plainly, they are the clever half." Mencken...