H. L. Mencken

In 1923, while he went to deliver a lecture in Baltimore, he met Sara Haardt, a professor of English at Goucher College and fell in love with her. She was eighteen years junior to him.

Courtship between Sara and Mencken lasted for seven years and finally they got married in 1930.

Sara was ill with tuberculosis throughout their married life and in 1935, she succumbed to meningitis, leaving Mencken heavily grief-stricken.

Henry Louis ‘H. L.’ Mencken was born to German-American parents - August Mencken, a cigar factory owner and Anna Abhau Mencken.

He completed his primary education at Professor Knapp's School. At the age of 16, he graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute.

From 1896 to 1898, he worked in his father’s cigar factory. He disliked the job and left the factory. The same year, he enrolled for a correspondence course in writing from the Cosmopolitan University.

In 1899, shortly after his father’s death, he handed over the family business to his uncle and started pursuing his career in writing.

He started his career with the ‘Baltimore Morning Herald’ in 1899 as its part-time reporter but soon rose to the position of editor.

In 1906, the ‘Herald’ ran out of business and was bought by Charles H. Grasty who launched The Baltimore Sun in 1910, where Mencken worked as a managing editor from 1911 to 1915.

Simultaneously, he started his career as a literary critic by editing satirical magazine like The Smart Set. He worked in the magazine from 1914-23.

In 1924, he partnered with Jean Nathan, the famous American drama critic and editor, and founded the magazine, ‘The American Mercury’ that was published by Alfred A. Knopf. He worked in it as an editor.

The magazine was widely popular in America. In 1933, he resigned from The American Mercury.

The American Language published in 1919 was his masterpiece, where he traced the history and evolution of American vernacular speech. The book gained him much popularity in the field of philology with republication in 1936 andprovided with Supplements in 1946 and 1948.

Prejudices, appearing in six volumes and published in 1919 were the collection of his critical writing.

Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943) are the three, autobiographical trilogy, where Mencken expressed his enchantment over his personal life.