Heeding the sage of Baltimore: a new edition of H.L. Mencken's Prejudices captures the legendary journalist at his corrosive best.

• Author: Root, Damon W.
• Position: Book review

Prejudices: The Complete Series, by H.L. Mencken, Library of America, 1,222 pages, $70

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

ON JULY 27, 1925, the great journalist, literary critic, and editor H.L. Mencken published his obituary for the left-wing populist, Christian fundamentalist, and three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan in the Baltimore Evening Sun. "Imagine a gentleman," Mencken wrote, "and you have imagined everything that he was not." Bryan had been "deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all beauty, all fine and noble things." Mencken practically danced on his grave.

Less than two weeks earlier, the two men had been together in Dayton, Tennessee, for the sensational trial of John Scopes, the public school teacher arrested for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Bryan was there to aid the prosecution; Mencken was there to file scathing reports about the persecution of "the infidel Scopes" and to quietly strategize with the defense. "Convert [the trial] into a headlong assault on Bryan," Mencken told defense attorney Clarence Darrow. And so Darrow did, grilling the aged orator on the witness stand about his biblical literalism. Less than a week later, Bryan was dead.

It was a major event in the long career that made Mencken one of America's most influential men of letters. In addition to the thousands of articles and reviews he wrote for magazines and newspapers, Mencken was me first American author to write a book on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the first American editor to publish the work of James Joyce. But the Scopes "Monkey Trial" came during a particularly influential period. The same busy stretch of history that sent Mencken to Tennessee also saw President Woodrow Wilson's wartime suppression of free speech and other civil liberties, the prohibition of alcohol, and a bloody epidemic of lynchings and racial terrorism in the South. An atheist, an individualist, and a classical liberal of extreme Jeffersonian tendencies, Mencken railed against them all, collecting many of his best attacks in the six-volume series of books he aptly rifled Prejudices.

Originally published in six volumes between 1919 and 1927, Prejudices was Mencken's attempt to "insert some rat-poison" into the country's political and literary life. It did the trick. With Prejudices: The Complete Series, a hefty new two-volume set published by the Library of America, today's readers...