Mencken: The American Iconoclast - Softcover

"This book is both enlightening and marvelous to read."―Blue Ridge Business Journal

"The most superb and entertaining biography (in any field) that I've read in years, one that has 'National Book Award' stamped all over it."―Joseph Goulden, Washington Times

"Skillfully written, broadly encompassing and fairly bristling with documentation, it is, overall, the best―as well as longest―of the four [major Mencken biographies]."―Chicago Sun-Times

"Definitive.... The last word on perhaps the most famous newspaper man of the 20th century."―Bloomsberg News

"Rodgers isn't the first to tell the story of powerful and controversial thinker and writer Mencken, but her affection for this notorious iconoclast and her access to untapped sources make for a uniquely fresh and absorbing biography."―Booklist (in naming Mencken one of the top ten biographies of the year)

"Every new generation should rediscover H. L. Mencken, and every journalist should read this fine biography. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has produced a balanced, measured portrait, proving herself as adept at probing the labyrinth of Mencken's private life as she is at placing his iconoclasm in the context of his times."―The London Sunday Times

"In this splendid biography...Rodgers juggles the dense narrative of Mencken's life and times with considerable dexterity, while also providing a glimpse into his very private world.... His was one of the key American literary lives of the 20th century and Rodgers has, quite simply, done him proud."―The London Independent

"Marion Rodgers has written a comprehensive and humane biography.... In these troubled times, compared to Mencken, with all his faults, we journalists look like pygmies."―The London Literary Review

"By far the best Mencken biography ever written―and this reviewer has read almost a dozen.... This book is a masterpiece.... If you care about America, ideas, courage, and good writing and read only one biography this year, I would suggest this be the one."―Toledo Blade

"Even now, almost 50 years after his death, many of Mencken's political insights hold true...as Rodgers shows in this thorough work, Mencken was more than a newspaperman and prolific author.... This is a meticulous portrait of one of the most original and complicated men in American letters." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts―the twentieth century's greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the finest book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers illuminates both the public and the private man, covering the many love affairs, his happy marriage at the age of 50 to Sara Haardt, and his complicated but stimulating friendship with the famed theater critic George Jean Nathan. Rodgers vividly recreates Mencken's era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America, the roaring twenties, depressed thirties, and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken. When few dared to shatter complacencies, Mencken fought for civil liberties and free speech, playing a prominent role in the Scope's Monkey Trial, battling against press censorship, and exposing pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes.
Drawing on research in more than sixty archives including private collections in the United States and in Germany, previously unseen, on exclusive interviews with Mencken's friends, and on his love letters and FBI files, here is the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and influential men.

"This biography, the best ever on the sage of Baltimore, is exhaustive but never exhausting, and offers readers more than moderate intelligence and an awfully good time."
―Martin Nolan, Boston Globe