H. L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography (review)

This comprehensive annotated bibliography is, as Joshi explains, “chiefly designed to provide substantive information on Mencken’s magazine and newspaper work—work that has not been studied from a bibliographic perspective since the publication of the first significant Mencken bibliography, Betty Adler’s H. L. M.: The Mencken Bibliography [1961] and its [ten-year] supplements [1962–1971, compiled by Adler (1971); 1972–1981, compiled by Vincent Fitzpatrick (1986)].” Richard J. Schrader’s more recent H. L. Mencken: A Descriptive Bibliography (1998), which, oddly enough, Joshi cites only as H. L. Mencken: A Bibliography, “describes [Mencken’s] publications from 1899 to 1996, with some exceptions,” including “the countless articles and reviews Mencken wrote for newspapers and magazines,” since Adler’s bibliography remained at the time “the authoritative source,” which allowed Schrader to simply add “a few items that she missed” (Schrader xv).

Therefore, Joshi refers to Schrader as the authoritative source for the books, pamphlets, and broadsides, authored, compiled, or translated by Mencken. Joshi’s “condensed” bibliographical entries include titles, publishers, and dates of original publications and subsequent editions or reprints, tables of contents, and, for the first time, word counts of nearly all items. The entries are supplemented with brief notes, most notably, on the original appearance of material in Mencken’s books, especially in the six volumes of his Prejudices series (1919–27), for which, however, as Joshi notes, research “is still ongoing.”

Joshi’s bibliography is divided into six sections. Section A lists Mencken’s books and pamphlets, from Ventures into Verse (1903) to Damn! and In Defense of Women (2007). Section B lists works edited or translated, from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1909) to the “Americana” series in the Smart Set (1923) and American Mercury (1924–33). Section C lists original contributions to books, from “Old Court Houses of Maryland” (Mencken’s first publication in 1899) to Mencken’s letters in the Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980). Section D lists original contributions to magazines, from Mencken’s poem “To Rudyard Kipling” in Bookman (1899) to letters from Mencken to Hermann E. Cohen in Menckeniana (2007), including other early verse, short stories, pseudonymous articles and essays, articles, reviews, and editorials in the Smart Set (1908–23), American Mercury (1924–33), and other magazines such as the Nation, Saturday Review of Literature, American Speech, and The New Yorker (serial publication of Mencken’s memoirs, Happy Days [1940], Newspaper Days [1941], and Heathen Days [1943], and Christmas Story [1946]). Section E lists original contributions to newspapers, including mainly articles in the Baltimore Herald (1899–1906), the Baltimore Sun (1906–48), the Baltimore Evening Sun (1910–17; 1920–40, including Mencken’s “Monday Column” [1920–38]), the New York Evening Mail (1917–18), the Chicago Sunday Tribune (1924–28), and the New York American (1934–36). Section F lists interviews (i.e., any article that does not feature Mencken’s byline and that refers to him in the third person, but not always in an interview in the conventional sense), from a report in the Havana Post (1917) on “Americans Not Badly Treated” (in Berlin) to William Manchester’s interview in the Baltimore Sun (1954), with its description of Mencken’s life after he had suffered a massive stroke in 1948.

The six sections of the bibliography are followed by four appendices. Appendix A lists the exact dates of Mencken’s 1228 “Free Lance” columns from May 9, 191l to October 23, 1915 in the Baltimore Evening Sun. It is too bad, but understandable, that these columns could not be listed and annotated in Section E, for they represent, as Joshi justifiably emphasizes in his Introduction, “some of the most scintillating and vibrant work of [Mencken’s] entire career,” distinguished by his “opposition to literary and dramatic censorship, to religious obscurantism . . ., and to quackery in all its forms.” However, Mencken’s persistent advocacy of the German cause during World War I, in contradiction to the editorial stance of the Evening Sun, resulted in abrupt...