Highly Irregular. The Newspaper Columns of Carl Bode - Hardcover

Although he is the leading biographer of Mencken and now writes for the paper Mencken himself once wrote for, Carl Bode is his own man before a typewriter and, as this collection shows, a singularly acute observer of popular culture.In his preface to this first collection of his popular newspaper columns written for the "Washington Post "and the "Baltimore Evening Sun, "Carl Bode says about the columns that in their background is a mixed bag of facts: that I teach American literature at the University of Maryland in College Park; that I divide much of my off-campus time between Washington and Baltimore; that both as a writer and a teacher I m attracted by two dizzyingly different literary rebels, Henry David Thoreau and H. L. Mencken; that I am delighted by my students and bemused by their ways; and that I m fascinated by the popular culture of our times as it shifts and sashays around. Readers who relish the human comedy in its American mode will especially enjoy this collection of pieces by an eminent student of our civilization who wears his learning lightly."

Carl Bode is the editor of a widely used Thoreau anthology and of Thoreau s collected poems. He is also the founder and first president of the American Studies Association, a past president of the Thoreau Society of America, a former cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Great Britain, and author or editor of a half-dozen books on popular culture as well as the author of the distinguished biography, "Mencken.""