Certain writers adopt noted public figures and build their careers around them, to wit: Justin Kaplan with Mark Twain, Robert Caro with Lyndon Johnson. And while Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has a good many years to go to achieve the time in grade enjoyed by Caro and Kaplan, she's carving out a niche for herself as the leading scholar of the Baltimore journalist and crusader H.L. Mencken.
Rodgers has edited Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters and The Impossible H.L. Mencken. Now, she has written a bookstop biography that may become the definitive work on the life of this luminous personality. It's called Mencken: The American Iconoclast.
Mencken's fluid pen allowed him famously to locate balloons held by establishment figures and then to, quite publicly, prick them. He once attacked Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." So it's not surprising that such activities as censorship were high on his list of subjects to criticize in print.
But Mencken didn't stop there. He was not only a newspaperman but editor of The American Mercury, a magazine in which he and his elect could vent their spleen on topics of the day. In 1926, he was invited to speak at Harvard and learned that Boston conservatives wanted to ban his magazine as indecent, so he eagerly took the issue to court in Beantown and won. This is the sort of incident that just fueled his passion for more confrontations.
Asked to summarize his philosophy, Mencken said, "The two main ideas that run through all my writing...are these: I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud."
Mencken was not only an able and energetic critic but a colorful one as well, with an avid eye for the ladies. The book's cover shows him draining a glass of beer and smoking a cigar, a not-unfamiliar pose for him. Rodgers's book has earned starred reviews from both Publishers' Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. It is 660 pages, with index, bibliography, ample source notes and illustrations sprinkled throughout the text.
