Professor H L Mencken

Writings in the Smart Set, Volume 6 Professor H L Mencken

In this sixth volume his writings from the Smart Set, H. L. Mencken praises James Branch Cabell's novel Jurgen, which was the focus of a subsequent trial for obscenity. In other review columns, Mencken discusses such writers as Upton Sinclair, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise), Mark Twain (by way of Van Wyck Brooks's study of him), Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis (Main Street), H. G. Wells (The Outline of History), and other important figures. Two columns on poetry focus on the work of Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and others. Mencken and his co-editor, George Jean Nathan, continue their "Répétition Générale" column, initiating a series of aphorisms that were later published as The American Credo. They also engage in a series of lively "conversations" on women, politics, and other subjects. Some of the most distinctive items in this volume are a series of brief, pungent prose poems, ranging from "A Panorama of Idiots" to "The Cat and His Shadow." In all, another feast of critical acumen, satire, polemic, and literary virtuosity.