The Skeptic : A Life of H. L. Mencken (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of The Skeptic : A Life of H. L. Mencken Saturday, August 1 2009.

• When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the "booboisie." Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him. Now Terry Teachout takes on the man Edmund Wilson called "our greatest practicing literary journalist," brilliantly capturing all of Mencken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped.

Shelfari edited the contributors of The Skeptic : A Life of H. L. Mencken Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Added a contributor: Terry Teachout: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The Skeptic : A Life of H. L. Mencken Thursday, July 16 2009.

• "I am going to Washington Saturday night to make a speech at the Gridiron Club dinner," H.L. Mencken wrote to a friend on December 7, 1934.