H. L. Mencken

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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), better known as H. L. Mencken, was a twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.

Works

Books

George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)
The Gist of Nietzsche (1910)
Men versus the Man: a Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910)
A Book of Burlesques (1916)
A Little Book in C Major (1916)
A Book of Prefaces (1917)
In Defense of Women (1918)
Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)
The American Language (1919)
Prejudices (1919–27)
- First Series (1919)
- Second Series (1920)
- Third Series (1922)
- Fourth Series (1924)
- Fifth Series (1926)
- Sixth Series (1927)
- Selected Prejudices (1927)
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Menckeneana: A Schimpflexikon (1928) - Editor
Treatise on the Gods (1930)
Making a President (1932)
Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)
Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940)
Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941)
Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943)
Christmas Story (1944)
A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948)

Posthumous collections

Minority Report (1956)
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1956)
The American Scene (1965) (Huntington Cairns, ed).
The Bathtub Hoax and Blasts & Bravos from the Chicago Tribune (1958)
The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection Of His Best Newspaper Stories (1991) (Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, ed).
My Life As Author and Editor (1992) (Jonathan Yardley, ed).
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1994)
A Religious Orgy in Tennessee A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2006) (Melville House Publishing).

Chapbooks, pamphlets, and notable essays