The decisive influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on H.L. Mencken is readily acknowledged in the vast literature on the great American journalist and social critic. However, Mencken's 1908 study of the philosopher has been relegated to footnote status by Mencken's critics and biographers and has been largely ignored by Nietzsche scholars. There are good reasons for reversing this judgment. Mencken's work was one of the first comprehensive and sympathetic treatments of Nietzsche's thought in the English language. It is a provocative engagement with the German philosopher's complex and elusive ideas, enhanced by a style that reverberates with a verve and dynamism approaching Nietzsche's own. Mencken presents a view of Nietzsche that elucidates the latter's complex and contentious form of the "gospel of individualism" while evincing a keen appreciation of his unrivalled capacity for critical analysis. The historical scope of Nietzsche's thought is fully evident in Mencken's analysis as is its application to modern societies and politics. In tracing the biographical and intellectual impetus for Nietzsche's relentless attacks on conventional moralities and established modes of thought, Mencken discerned both an ideal and a method for grappling with social and cultural issues that remain salient in our own time.

The decisive influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on H.L. Mencken is readily acknowledged in the vast literature on the great American journalist and social critic. However, Mencken's 1908 study of the philosopher has been relegated to footnote status by Mencken's critics and biographers and has been largely ignored by Nietzsche scholars. There are good reasons for reversing this judgment. Mencken's work was one of the first comprehensive and sympathetic treatments of Nietzsche's thought in the English language. It is a provocative engagement with the German philosopher's complex and elusive ideas, enhanced by a style that reverberates with a verve and dynamism approaching Nietzsche's own.

Mencken presents a view of Nietzsche that elucidates the latter's complex and contentious form of the "gospel of individualism" while evincing a keen appreciation of his unrivalled capacity for critical analysis. The historical scope of Nietzsche's thought is fully evident in Mencken's analysis as is its application to modern societies and politics. In tracing the biographical and intellectual impetus for Nietzsche's relentless attacks on conventional moralities and established modes of thought, Mencken discerned both an ideal and a method for grappling with social and cultural issues that remain salient in our own time.

This is Nietzsche's last book and a fitting capstone to his career. It's succinct, biting, and encapsulates the criticisms of Christianity found in his other works. This edition contains an 8,000-word introduction by its translator, the famous iconoclastic writer H. L. Mencken.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: "Happy Days," "Heathen Days," "Newspaper Day"s, "Prejudices," "Treatise on the Gods," "On Politics," "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," "Minority Report," and "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."

In 1956, Mencken read through his notebooks and extracted those pieces he thought truest, most pertinent, most precise, or most likely to blow the dust out of a reader's brain.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

A major literary event: Mencken s dazzling autobiography, with 200 pages of his own never-before-published commentary and photos. In 1936, at the age of fifty-five, H. L. Mencken published a reminiscence about his boyhood in The New Yorker, beginning a long and magnificent adventure in autobiography by America s greatest journalist. Mencken went on to gather his childhood recollections in Happy Days (1940), a richly detailed, poignant account of growing up in Baltimore. A critical and popular success, the book surprised many with its glimpses of a less curmudgeonly Mencken, and there soon followed the absorbing sequels Newspaper Days (1941), charting his rise at the Baltimore Herald from cub reporter to editor, and Heathen Days (1943), recounting his varied excursions as journalist and public figure, including his coverage of the Scopes trial in 1925. But unknown to the legions of Days books admirers, Mencken continued to add to them after publication, annotating and expanding each volume in typescripts sealed to the public for twenty-five years after his death. Until now, most of this material often more frank and unvarnished than the original Days books has never been published. Containing nearly 200 pages of previously unseen writing, and illustrated with photographs from Mencken s archives, many taken by Mencken himself, this expanded and definitive edition of the Days trilogy is a cause for celebration."

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: "Happy Days," "Heathen Days," "Newspaper Day"s, "Prejudices," "Treatise on the Gods," "On Politics," "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," "Minority Report," and "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."

Most of these autobiographical writings first appeared in the "New Yorker." Here Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. In the second volume of his autobiography, Mencken recalls his years as a young reporter.

Few writers roiled the American cultural scene like Henry Louis Mencken. Pathbreaking journalist, trenchant social observer, and unbridled humorist, Mencken was the most provocative and influential cultural critic of the last century. To read him today is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as our own, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness. In the six volumes of "Prejudices" published between 1919 and 1927, Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Now, The Library of America restores the full text of Mencken's landmark work to print in a deluxe two- volume boxed set, ensuring that new generations of readers can rediscover his one-of-a-kind genius.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: "Happy Days," "Heathen Days," "Newspaper Day"s, "Prejudices," "Treatise on the Gods," "On Politics," "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," "Minority Report," and "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."

Written in 1941-42, these highlights capture the excitement of newspaper life in the heyday of print journalism.

H. L. Mencken was perhaps the leading literary and cultural critic of the 1920s, and his books, magazine articles, and newspaper writing have given him a wide and enduring celebrity. Just about the last literary form that most readers would have expected Mencken to have attempted is poetry; and yet, in his early literary career, he wrote dozens of poems for a variety of publications. His very first book, Ventures into Verse (1903), was a slim collection of poetry. But that volume constitutes less than a third of Mencken's total output of poetry. Leading Mencken scholar S. T. Joshi has now, for the first time, collected the entirety of Mencken's verse, ranging from patriotic poems in the manner of Kipling, to satirical poems poking fun at politicians, actresses, and the institution of marriage, to surprisingly touching poems on romance, the seasons, and other subjects. Mencken exhibited an enviable skill in the handling of complex verse forms, and he also found the multifarious events of his day-from the Boer War to the Boxer Rebellion to the anti-liquor crusades of Carry Nation-fodder for his poetical pen. Mencken's many devotess can now sample the full range of his work as poet and poetical satirist. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) is best known for his critical essays, collected in Prejudices (1919-27) and many other volumes, as well as his journalism for the Baltimore Evening Sun and other papers. His total output of writing comes to more than 12 million words. S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on Mencken and the editor of H. L. Mencken on American Literature (2002), Mencken's America (2004), and other volumes. He has recently published a new bibliography of Mencken (2009).

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: "Happy Days," "Heathen Days," "Newspaper Day"s, "Prejudices," "Treatise on the Gods," "On Politics," "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," "Minority Report," and "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."

In the third volume of his autobiography, H. L. Mencken covers a range of subjects, from Hoggie Unglebower, the best dog trainer in Christendom, to his visit to the Holy Land, where he looked for the ruins of Gomorrah.