Ambivalent Victorian: H. L. Mencken

During the 1920s, H. L. Mencken was the voice of the educated and sophisticated throughout America. His criticism of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, his characterization of Main Street Americans as the"booboisie" and of Puritans as people haunted by the "fear that someone, somewhere may be happy"--all this made Mencken a hero to a generation that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Walter Lipp- mann. But during the 1930s, when he directed his anti-establishment f...

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