H. L. Mencken lived all but six years in the same Baltimore row house at 1524 Hollins Street. The son of German immigrants, he was to have worked in the family cigar factory, but he was a writer at heart and by determination. In 1896 he entered the family business and wrote his first short story. That same year he made his first attempt at reporting, a baseball story, and drafted a comic-opera libretto.

He resolved to write a poem each day that he was forced by family obligation to work in the factory. In 1898 he took a correspondence course in writing as he unhappily continued to work for his father. When his father died in January 1899, he worked days at the factory and every evening for weeks worked unpaid at the Baltimore Herald. In June, at seven dollars per week, his career in journalism began. In Newspaper Days, Mencken declared this was the "maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth."

Most remembered as a Baltimore columnist with acerbic wit and the reporter who covered the Scopes trial, H.L. Mencken was a newspaper editor, a book reviewer, magazine editor and contributor, and author of books. Often he acknowledged, revising a newspaper column for a magazine article and then reworking it for inclusion in a book.

Since the focus of "Only a Matter of Opinion?" is editorials and columns, we provide examples of his work in these areas. We do encourage teachers and students to read the wide range of Mencken's expression. "Mencken was the best prose writer in America during the Twentieth Century," accordinging to distinguished critic Joseph Wood Krutch.

His columns were read, discussed and argued. In 1926 Walter Lippman called Mencken "the most powerful personal influence upon this whole generation of American people."

Mencken is not without distractors. Certainly an obituary writer who begins his eulogy of William Jennings Bryan without tact or sensitivity will be chastised: "Has it been marked by historians that the late William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this earth was to catch flies?" (see "Bryan," Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925). More recently he has been condemned a racist after publication in late 1989 of The Diary of H. L. Mencken.

He was a man who lived by consistent principles. In October 1927 in "Testament" (Review of Reviews) he wrote, "that it is better to tell the truth than to lie, that it is better to be free than to be a slave, [and] that it is better to have knowledge than to be ignorant."

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE LITERARY LIFE OF H. L. MENCKEN

TOPICS for Further Study of H. L. Mencken

1. Freedoms of speech and press and the Mercury
2. H. L. Mencken and F. D. Roosevelt
3. The Scopes Trial as covered by H. L. Mencken
4. Compare and contrast Mencken's Scopes Trial coverage to Inherit the Wind's presentation of key figures
5. "Days of Innocence," H. L. Mencken sketches in The New Yorker, February 1941 to September 1943
6. H. L. Mencken's coverage of presidential elections
7. H. L. Mencken's last look at politics - the summer of 1948
8. Irreverent, satiric and honest - H. L. Mencken
9. The American Language as known and shown by H. L. Mencken
10. In the Bookman in October 1928, Mencken says "No other country houses so many gorgeous frauds and imbeciles as the United States .... I love this country as a small boy loves the circus." Research what national and international events took place in 1928. Read articles by Mencken in the same time period. How do they reflect his statement?
11. H. L. Mencken is the primary example of the columnist as curmudgeon. Read a sampling of his columns. Write a paper defining a curmudgeon through examples from his writing.