Scourage of the booboisie: weighing H.L. Mencken's legacy.

• Author: Shafer, Jack
• Position: Culture and Reviews - 'The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken' - Book Review

The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout, New York: HarperCollins, 432 pages, $29.95

IMAGINE THE HORROR of writing a great man's biography. Not just your garden variety great man, but H.L. Mencken, the firebrand individualist who reinvented journalism, upended politics, beat the complacent linguists at their own game, terrorized the sincerely pious, and fumigated the halls of literary criticism. A man whose words, a half-century after his death, continue to shape the way we think.

Then imagine piloting that book through the wake cut by the half-dozen existing Mencken biographies, a couple of which have told the great man's story well, and compound the horror with the knowledge that contracts for two other major Mencken biographies have been signed. But your fellow biographers are not your main competition in telling the tale. The subject himself is.

An American Pepys, Mencken recorded nearly every thought that passed through his mind and practically every major social engagement on his calendar. Without being an exhibitionist, Mencken revealed his personal life in three volumes of memoirs, classics of the genre; in many thousands of letters; and in his voluminous and blunt diaries, which he protected from publication until well after his death. Adding Mencken's criticism, commentary, scholarly work, and reportage to the count, this laureate of free thinking and enemy of government committed more than 5 million words to paper before a stoke addled much of his brain at the age of 68 and death harvested him in 1956, eight years later.

Daunted or not, Terry Teachout -- critic, essayist, and lapsed editorial writer (New York Daily News) -- accepted the job in 1990. He told the Los Angeles Times that he intended to write an epic on the scale of American Caesar, William Manchester's 793-page biography of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Born in Victorian America to bourgeois parents in Baltimore, Henry Louis Mencken and journalism met cute when a Baltimore No. 10 Self-Inker Printing Press arrived under the tree on his eighth Christmas. The magic of ink, words, and paper seduced him early on, so when Mencken's father's premature death freed Henry from the family cigar making business in 1899, the 18-year-old hired on as a reporter at the Baltimore Morning Herald.

Still, his lightning rise from cub reporter to critic to editor-in-chief of the Morning Herald by the age of 26 and his early freelance career as writer of articles, fiction, and poetry don't give a clue to the grand influence over American letters that would be Mencken's by his 30s.

From his provincial roost of Baltimore (and neither benefiting from nor hindered by a day in college), Mencken detected greatness in other writers with an extraordinary literary radar. He wrote the first book in America on George Bernard Shaw and one of the earliest studies on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, championed Huckleberry Finn before it was fashionable, and called hell and calumny down on Henry James' prose style from his newspaper column. "Take any considerable sentence from any of his novels and examine its architecture. Does it wriggle and stumble and stagger and flounder?" Mencken wrote. "Doesn't it begin in the middle and work away from both ends? Doesn't it bounce along for a while and then, all of a sudden, roll up its eyes and go out of business entirely?"

Mencken consolidated his...