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Description
H. L. Mencken’s reputation as a journalist and cultural critic of the twentieth century has endured well into the twenty-first. His early contributions as a writer, however, are not very well known. He began his journalistic career as early as 1899 and in 1910 cofounded the Baltimore Evening Sun. The next year he initiated a column—The Free Lance—that ran six days a week for four and a half years, until the Sun discontinued it, partially in response to Mencken’s controversial defense of Germany during World War One.
In this early forum for his renowned wit, Mencken broached many of the issues to which he would return again and again over his career, establishing himself as a fearless iconoclast willing to tackle the most divisive subjects and apply a heady mix of observation, satire, and repartee to clear away what he regarded as the “saturnalia of bunk” that clouded American thinking. The Free Lance reveals Mencken at his scintillating best as a journalist, polemicist, and satirist.
These columns are collected here for the first time, edited and annotated by Mencken expert and critic S. T. Joshi. This extraordinary collection is an invaluable resource for Mencken scholars and fans and provides an entertaining immersion into the early twentieth-century American zeitgeist.
Copyright Statement
A Saturnalia of Bunk © 2017 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Language
eng
ISBN
9780821446027
Publication Date
7-3-2017
Publisher
Ohio University Press
City
Athens
Keywords
H.L. Mencken, satire, journalism, American politics, democracy, skepticism, rhetoric, propaganda, public opinion, intellectual criticism, populism, social commentary, media influence, political discourse, humor, cynicism, cultural critique, freedom of speech, 1920s America, political skepticism
Disciplines
American Studies | Creative Writing | Journalism Studies
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mencken, H. L. and Joshi, S. T., "A Saturnalia of Bunk : Selections from The Free Lance, 1911–1915" (2017). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 83.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/83