The Skeptic A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout HarperCollins, 432 pp., $29.95 IN THE FALL OF 1923, James M. Cain, a reporter then aspiring to a literary career, had lunch in Baltimore with H.L.

H.L. Mencken’s reputation as the “bad boy” of Baltimore might earn him membership in the ranks of intellectuals who advocated a brave new world to replace the timid old one. He was, after all, the ...

Brad Leithauser is the author of numerous books, including "Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse" and "The Odd Last Thing She Did: Poems." When moved to scorn--and he was often scornful--H. L. Mencken ...

These are hard times for elitists. On the left and on the right, populist mobs are lighting torches and passing out pitchforks. Soon they may start herding plutocrats onto tumbrels and rolling them ...

“So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. Go ahead. Go to your nearest campus and find a single English major who’s heard of the Sage ...

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 8 of “Succession,” now streaming on HBO Max. It’s Roman Roy’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Sunday’s ...

Respectable opinion these days has it that H.L. Mencken was a great prose stylist and, in connection with that, one of the greatest American journalists of the 20th century, but not a man whose ideas ...

Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken died in 1956 at the age of 75. Mencken has been referred to as the “Sage of Baltimore”. Primarily, Mencken was a journalist. For most of his career, he was a reporter and a ...

Recently, there appeared two items concerning H. L. Mencken, and I wish that somebody would explain them. Taken together, they don't make sense. Item I. The Modern Library has reprinted Scott ...

When the Sunpapers bought City Paper last spring, we were uncertain, to say the least. We’d been through a heavy battle with our old owners. We’d been for sale for a long time. We were tired. And then ...