Prejudices: The Complete Series »

Few writers roiled the American cultural scene like Henry Louis Mencken. Pathbreaking journalist, trenchant social observer, and unbridled humorist, Mencken was the most provocative and influential cultural critic of the last century. To read him today is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as our own, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness. In the six volumes of Prejudices published between 1919 and 1927, Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Now, The Library of America restores the full text of Mencken's landmark work to print in a deluxe two- volume boxed set, ensuring that new generations of readers can rediscover his one-of-a-kind genius.

The Barnes & Noble Review

To be sure, in the pages of Prejudices he's sometimes dull and stupid, as when he issues decrees on women's clothing and makeup or on the relations between the sexes; sometimes he's just dull, though unavoidably so, as when he lays into middle-brow writers lost to history; and sometimes he's brilliantly hard-hitting as when he takes on American journalism and other forms of timeserving. There are many reasons to read Prejudices, but for me one trumps them all: that combative, beautifully sprung, ingeniously funny style, as irresistible as a laughing baby.