Few writers roiled the American cultural scene like Henry Louis Mencken. Pathbreaking journalist, trenchant social observer, and unbridled humorist, Mencken was the most provocative and influential cultural critic of the last century. To read him today is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars[...]

A major literary event: Mencken's dazzling autobiography, with 200 pages of his own never-before-published commentary and photos. In 1936, at the age of fifty-five, H. L. Mencken published a reminiscence about his boyhood in "The New Yorker," beginning a long and magnificent adventure in autobiograp[...]