Blends biographical and critical commentary to provide an overview of the controversial newspaperman and writer's life and work

The legendary H. L. Mencken exists solely in the minds of his hostile critics and his least intelligent admirers, who have derived their impression of him from his opponents rather than from himself. -from H. L. Mencken In this spirited exploration of the career of H. L. Mencken, Ernest Boyd looks at the controversial journalist and freethinker as an American and quintessential Baltimorean ("whenever he is guilty of the slightest treason against Baltimore, he hastens to make amends"), as a philosopher and contradictory defender of Nietzsche, and as a critic, "hard-working hedonist and champion of the plutocracy, romantic survivor of the age of American innocence." Boyd leaves no doubt as to why Mencken is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. American author ERNEST BOYD (1887-1946) was born in Dublin but began his literary career in New York City in 1920. Among his works of commentary, criticism, and translation Portraits, Real and Imaginary (1924), Guy de Maupassant (1926), and Literary Blasphemies (1927).

Controversial even before it was published in 1930, Treatise on the Gods collects Mencken's scathing commentary on religion.

Baltimore native Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an essayist, literary critic, magazine editor, novelist, and journalist. Starting as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the century, Mencken eventually became associated with the Baltimore Sun and his work for the newspaper spanned five decades. In H.L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography, S.T. Joshi provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive bibliography of the writings of H. L. Mencken ever assembled. It presents detailed information on his book publications from 1903 to the present, with a full list of editions and reprints. Most significantly, it presents for the first time a comprehensive annotated listing of his magazine and newspaper work (including more than 1,500 anonymous editorials for the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Evening Sun, and other papers, which have never been listed in any previous bibliographies), a thorough index to his book reviews, and a full list of interviews Mencken gave during his lifetime. Word counts of nearly every item in the bibliography have been supplied, and the book has been thoroughly indexed by name, title, and periodical. Because every item has been annotated, scholars and students can, for the first time, gain an idea of the subject-matter of all Mencken's writings, especially his magazine and newspaper work. The indexes will allow users to locate any given item with ease. The chronological arrangement of each section allows users to understand the growth and development of Mencken's work, making this volume an invaluable resource.

Davis Country collects the best writings of H. L. Davis, one of the Northwest's premier authors and the only Oregonian to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Born in southern Oregon's Umpqua Valley in 1894, Davis grew up in Antelope and The Dalles. He began as a poet, receiving the prestigious Levinson Prize at age twenty-Five. With the encouragement of H. L. Mencken, he turned to fiction, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1935 novel Honey in the Horn, which Mencken called the best first novel ever published in America. Full of humor and humanity, Davis's work displays a vast knowledge of Pacific Northwest history, lore, and landscape. His instinctive feel for the Northwest-the weather, trees, plants, animals, the varieties of Oregon rain, the smell of forest winds and high-desert heat-is unmatched. This volume gathers many of Davis's finest stories, essays, poems, and letters, as well as excerpts from his most famous novels. An introduction by editors Brian Booth and Glen Love, a brief autobiography, and an afterword on Davis's final, unfinished novel provide for a better understanding of this truly original Northwest voice. Book jacket.

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies