ompared the man’s reputation in America to George Bernard Shaw’s in Britain.
It was Mencken’s reporting on the Scopes trial — and particularly the savagery of his attack on the aging and inept prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan — that made him a national terror. Bryan collapsed and died just as the trial ended; in his obituary, Mencken wrote:
“There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main Street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust — so accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. I believe that this liking was sincere — perhaps the only sincere thing in the man.”
Mencken wrote 30 books — poetry, fiction, essays, even a play. His most serious was the monumental 1921 work, The American Language. But it is his witty, stylish essays — for example, The Smart Set (1912) — that display Mencken at his epigrammatic best. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.” “Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” “Judge: a law student who marks his own examinations.”
A long time bachelor, Mencken shocked even his close friends by marrying at age 50 in 1930. Alas, his wife, Sara, died just five years later.
In 1948, Mencken suffered a severe stroke. He could no longer read or write. Worse, he was conscious of his limitations. Near the end, he told a visitor: “You know, I had a superb time while it lasted.” He died in his bed 57 years ago today.
Mencken summed up his philosophy of life this way:
“Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and inescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive factor of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself — by his incontrovertible talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.”