"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." -- H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Mencken, known as the "Sage of Baltimore", is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century.
Mencken is known for writing The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and for his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he named the "Monkey" trial. In addition to his literary accomplishments, Mencken was known for his controversial ideas. An opponent of World War II and democracy, Mencken wrote a huge number of articles about current events, books, music, prominent politicians, pseudo-intellectuals, temperance and uplifters. He notably attacked ignorance, intolerance, frauds, fundamentalist Christianity, osteopathy, and chiropractic.
"A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.""A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.""A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.""A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.""A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.""A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.""A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.""A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.""A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.""A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.""A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.""A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.""A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.""Adultery is the application of democracy to love.""Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.""All government, of course, is against liberty.""All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.""An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.""Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.""As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.""Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.""Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.""Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.""Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.""Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.""Criticism is prejudice made plausible.""Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.""Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.""Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.""Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.""Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.""Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.""Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.""Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.""Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.""Every man is his own hell.""Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.""Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.""Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.""For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.""For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.""For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.""Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.""Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.""Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.""Honor is simply the morality of superior men.""Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.""I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.""I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.""I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.""I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.""I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.""I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.""I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.""I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.""I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.""If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.""If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.""If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.""Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.""In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.""In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.""In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.""Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.""It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.""It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.""It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.""It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.""It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.""It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.""It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.""It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.""It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.""Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.""Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.""Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.""Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.""Life is a dead-end street.""Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.""Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.""Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.""Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.""Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.""Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.""Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.""Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?""Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.""Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.""Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.""Most people want security in this world, not liberty.""Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.""Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.""No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.""No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.""No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.""No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.""No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.""Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.""One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.""Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.""Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.""Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.""Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.""Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.""Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.""Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.""Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.""Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.""The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.""The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.""The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.""The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.""The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.""The cynics are right nine times out of ten.""The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.""The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.""The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.""The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.""The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.""The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.""The only really happy folk are married women and single men.""The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.""The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.""The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.""The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.""The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.""The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.""Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.""There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.""There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.""There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.""Time stays, we go.""To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.""To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!""Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.""War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.""We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.""We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.""We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.""Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.""What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.""When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.""When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.""Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.""Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.""Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.""Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love."
Mencken was the son of August Mencken, Sr., a cigar factory owner of German extraction. When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street, in the Union Square neighborhood of Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his days.
When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life." He determined to become a writer himself. He read prodigiously.
Mencken's parents insisted that his high school education favor the practical over the intellectual, and very early on he took a night class in how to write copy for newspapers and business. This was to be all of Mencken's formal education in journalism, or indeed in any other subject, as he never attended college.
Mencken became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899, then moved to The Baltimore Sun in 1906. He continued to contribute to the Sun full time until 1948, when he ceased to write.
Mencken began writing the editorials and opinion pieces that made his name. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, and even poetry – which he later reviled. In 1908, he became a literary critic for the magazine The Smart Set, and in 1924, he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf. It soon developed a national circulation and became highly influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, Mencken resigned as editor.
In 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author who was 18 years his junior. Haardt had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment. The two had met in 1923 after Mencken delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations between the sexes, had gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me," Mencken said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one." Even more startling, he was marrying an Alabama native despite his having written scathing essays about the American South. Haardt was in poor health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken. He had always supported her writing, and after her death had a collection of her short stories published under the title Southern Album.During the Great Depression, Mencken did not support the New Deal. This cost him popularity, as did his strong reservations regarding the United States' participation in World War II, and his overt contempt for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He ceased writing for the Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing on his memoirs and other projects as editor, while serving as an advisor for the paper that had been his home for nearly his entire career. In 1948, he briefly returned to the political scene, covering the presidential election in which President Harry S. Truman faced Republican Thomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party. His later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays, first published in The New Yorker, then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
On November 23, 1948 Mencken suffered a stroke that left him aware and fully conscious but nearly unable to read or write, and to speak only with some difficulty.After his stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to European classical music and, after some recovery of his ability to speak, talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense as if already dead. Preoccupied as he was with his legacy, he organized his papers, letters, newspaper clippings and columns, even grade school report cards. These materials were made available to scholars in stages, in 1971, 1981, and 1991, and include hundreds of thousands of letters sent and received – the only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956. He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery. During his Smart Set days Mencken wrote a joking epitaph for himself:
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
Although this famous quote is not on his tombstone, it is widely reported on the Internet as being inscribed on a plaque in the lobby of the Baltimore Sun.
In his capacity as editor and "man of ideas," Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time, including Theodore Dreiser who introduced him to Charles Fort and the Fortean Society, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, Ben Hecht, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Alfred Knopf, as well as a mentor to several young reporters, including Alistair Cooke. He also championed artists whose works he considered worthy. For example, he asserted that books such as Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929), by Eddie Cantor (ghost written by David Freedman) did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined. He also mentored John Fante. In a July 1934 letter, Ayn Rand (A. Z. Rosenbaum) addressed Mencken as "the greatest representative of a philosophy" to which she wanted to dedicate her life, and, in later years, listed him as her favorite columnist.
Mencken frankly admired Friedrich Nietzsche – he was the first writer to provide a scholarly analysis in English of Nietzsche's writings and philosophy – and Joseph Conrad. His humor and satire owe much to Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. He did much to defend Theodore Dreiser, despite freely admitting his faults, including stating forthrightly that Dreiser often wrote badly and was a gullible man. Mencken also expressed his appreciation for William Graham Sumner in a 1941 collection of Sumner's essays, and regretted never having known Sumner personally.For Mencken, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest work of American literature. Much of that book relates how gullible and ignorant country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them) are swindled by confidence men like the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle by posing as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), as pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and as learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). Mencken read the novel as a story of America's hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "...the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."
As a nationally syndicated columnist and book author, he notably attacked ignorance, intolerance, frauds, fundamentalist Christianity, osteopathy, chiropractic, and the "Booboisie," his word for the ignorant middle classes. In 1926, he deliberately had himself arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury that was banned in Boston under the Comstock laws. Mencken heaped scorn not only on the public officials he disliked, but also on the contemporary state of American democracy itself: in 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia."
Mencken had a great interest in music. He joined a local Baltimore club known as the Saturday Night Club, a gathering of local men who got together once a week and played music and drank beer. Mencken played the piano and favored the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Bach, but not much else.
Instead of arguing that one race or group was superior to another, Mencken believed that every community – whether the community of train porters, blacks, newspapermen, or artists – produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their own communities, but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement – not by race or birth. Based on his achievement and work ethic, Mencken considered himself a member of this group.
In 1989, per his instructions, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary of H. L. Mencken. According to an item in the South Bay (California) Daily Breeze on December 5, 1989, titled "Mencken's Secret Diary Shows Racist Leanings," Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it," Charles A. Fecher of Baltimore. There was a club in Baltimore called the Maryland Club which had one Jewish member, and that member died. Mencken said "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable," according to the article. And the diary quoted him as saying of blacks, in 1943, "...it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman..." However, violence against blacks outraged Mencken. For example, he had this to say about a Maryland lynching:
Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.
Democracy
Rather than dismissing democracy as a popular fallacy or treating it with open contempt, Mencken's response to it was a publicized sense of amusement. His feelings on this subject (like his casual feelings on many other such subjects) are sprinkled throughout his writings over the years, very occasionally taking center-stage with the full force of Mencken's prose:
[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power – which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters – which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.
This sentiment is fairly consistent with Mencken's distaste for common notions and the philosophical outlook he unabashedly set down throughout his life as a writer (drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, among others).
Mencken wrote as follows about the difficulties of good men reaching national office when such campaigns must necessarily be conducted remotely:
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre – the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Jews
Mencken occasionally made anti-semitic statements. In his introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche's The Antichrist:
On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy – i.e., a caste of gentlemen –, but he will at least make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.
Nevertheless, Mencken had a favorable attitude toward the "Judaized" plutocracy as compared to the "Christianized" democrats and proletarians, whom he held in bitter contempt:
But whenever you find a Davidsbündlerschaft making practise against the Philistines, there you will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spoke against them. He was not blind to their faults, but when he set them beside Christians he could not deny their general superiority. Perhaps in America and England, as on the Continent, the increasing Jewishness of the plutocracy, while cutting it off from all chance of ever developing into an aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a dignity that it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect.
Although Mencken idealized German culture and may have inherited racial and antisemitic attitudes common in late 19th-century Germany, he came to view Adolf Hitler as a buffoon, and once compared him to a common Ku Klux Klan member.
In Treatise on the Gods (1930), Mencken wrote:
The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.
The progressive writer Gore Vidal defended Mencken:
Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when the New York Times, say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, 1938, Mencken writes (Baltimore Sun), "It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them." He then reviews the various schemes to "rescue" the Jews from the Nazis, who had not yet announced their own final solution.
As Hitler gradually conquered Europe, Mencken attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States:
There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?
Mencken's home at 1524 Hollins Street, where he lived for 67 years before his death in 1956, in Baltimore's Union Square neighborhood was bequeathed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore on the death of Mencken's younger brother August in 1967. The City of Baltimore acquired the property in 1983 and the "H. L. Mencken House" became part of the City Life Museums. The house has been closed to general admission since 1997, but is opened for special events and group visits by arrangement.
Library
Shortly after World War II, Mencken expressed his intention of bequeathing his books and papers to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. At the time of his death in 1956, the Library was in possession of most of the present large collection. As a result, Mencken's papers as well as much of his library, which includes many books inscribed by major authors, are held in the Central branch of the Pratt Library on Cathedral Street in Baltimore. The original H. L. Mencken Room and Collection, on the third floor, housing this collection, was dedicated on April 17, 1956. The new Mencken Room, on the first floor of the Library's Annex, was opened in November 2003.
The collection contains Mencken's typescripts, his newspaper and magazine contributions, his published books, family documents and memorabilia, clipping books, a large collection of presentation volumes, a file of correspondence with prominent Marylanders, and the extensive material he collected while preparing The American Language.
Other collections of Menckenia are at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University. The Sara Haardt Mencken collection is at Goucher College. Some of Mencken's vast literary correspondence is held at the New York Public Library.