HLM at his peak

The Mencken Society Home Page

Honoring the memory of and promoting the reading of the living works of Henry Louis Mencken (1880-09-12—1956-01-29), the “Sage of Baltimore”, American author, critic, newspaper man and iconoclast.

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”—“Epitaph”, Smart Set, 1921-12-03, p. 33

 

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Mencken Day 2011

Mencken Day falls on Saturday, September 10, 2011, and will be held, as usual, at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St, Baltimore. The Society’s meeting begins at 10:30 PM in the Wheeler Auditorium on the third-floor.

The Society’s speaker, Peter Mallios, professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, will tell us about “H. L. Mencken, ‘Foreign’ Literature, and the Invention of Free Speech in Modern America.”

The Pratt Library’s 2011 Mencken Memorial Lecture will be given at 2:30 PM by Washington Post columnist and writer Michael Dirda who will speak on “The Literary Journalist in the Era of H. L. Mencken: Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Clifton Fadiman”.

The Society’s President Emeritus Arthur J. Gutman (r. 1979 to 1999) will be celebrating his 100th birthday this year.

The Mencken Room will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Mencken House will be open to the public the following day, September 11, 2011, from noon until 6:00 PM.

Christine Lavin’s “H. L. Mencken’s Pen”

Folk singer Christine Lavin has graciously allowed the Mencken Society to make her song “H. L. Mencken’s Pen” available for download. We offer both the studio version and a live version with a spoken introduction “that explains exactly how this project got started”. To download, right-click on the mp3 icon and select “save target as”.)

H. L. Mencken’s Pen, Live recording with a spoken introduction
Recorded: June 20, 2009 at The Ark in Ann Arbor, MI
Recording engineer: Fred Ellert
Mastered by Phillip E. Klum, NYC

H. L. Mencken’s Pen (2008), Studio version
Christine Lavin: vocal and guitar
Steve Doyle: bass
Robin Batteau: violin
Produced by Brian Bauers at Midtown Sound, NYC
Mastered by Phillip E. Klum, NYC

Mencken Digital Collection Grows

The Enoch Pratt Free Library is continously posting new Mencken material on its H. L. Mencken Collection wesbsite. Visit the site from time to time to see what new material has been added.

Camille

Mr Mencken appears briefly in a 16-mm home movie, Camille, made by the American cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Barton (1891-1931). Marion Rodgers mentions this film on page 320 of her Mencken: The American Iconoclast (2005).

The film has been posted in four parts on YouTube. Mr Mencken appears in the second part, “Camille2.mov”, at 56.9 seconds into the video (for 6.2 seconds) and again, with Joseph Hergesheimer (1880-1954), at 4 minutes 31 seconds (for 22.5 seconds). More about Camille and can be found in Bruce Kellner, The Last Dandy, Ralph Barton: American Artist, 1891-1931 (University of Missouri Press, 1991).

We also present the film as a series of snapshots taken at 20 second intervals after the title (so not all scences are captured) and the text of all the tile-cards.

Mencken Window Restored

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Updated: Tue Jul 12 20:57:53 EDT 2011
Previous: Tue Jul 12 15:16:43 EDT 2011

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