H.L. Mencken revisited

the long version

With H. L. Mencken Revisited, historian and scholar William H. A. Williams presents a thorough and up-to-date revision of his acclaimed 1977 study of Mencken. Integrating two decades of new scholarship and addressing recently disclosed materials and allegations, Williams provides readers with a highly readable and authoritative overview of Mencken's lifework. Ably fulfilling its goal of furnishing an intellectual biography and showing how Mencken's ideas developed and changed over time, the volume chronicles Mencken's vision of the artist-iconoclast, appraises his contributions to American thought and letters, traces his transition from literary to sociocultural critic, and explores his major themes and views on pre- and postwar society. The study also incorporates new sections on Theodore Dreiser, the South, African Americans, and the question of racism, and concludes by placing Mencken within the tradition of American critics of democracy. Mencken's writing, Williams observes, shows "courage, conviction, and serious commitment to ideals." Yet "deeper still, we catch glimpses of a sad, lonely man, unable to integrate the contradictory forces he tried to contain."