Full name: The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken

Author: Terry Teachout Year: 2002 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Non Fiction, History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780060505295 006050529X

When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the "booboisie." Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him. Now Terry Teachout takes on the man Edmund Wilson called "our greatest practicing literary journalist," brilliantly capturing all of Mencken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped. Similar books: Balzac by Stefan Zweig Victor Hugo by Graham Robb Samuel Beckett by Anthony Cronin Aldous Huxley by Nicholas Murray Tony Hancock by John Fisher The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald Dorothy Day by William Miller The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings Tom by Lyle Leverich The Lonely Hunter by Virginia Spencer Carr Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan The Kindness of Strangers by Donald Spoto Anthony Trollope by Victoria Glendinning Eudora Welty by Suzanne Marrs A Rage to Live by Mary S. Lovell Pops by Terry Teachout The Wright Brothers by David McCullough Mobituaries by Mo Rocca Gandhi by Mahatma Gandhi The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir