THIRTY FIVE YEARS NEWSPAPER WORK MPB

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

Written in 1941–42, these highlights capture the excitement of newspaper life in the heyday of print journalism.

Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1880 and remained a lifelong resident. Opinionated and controversial, he wrote columns for the Baltimore Evening Sun that earned him a national reputation. He died in 1956.

Fred Hobson is a professor of American literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has written several books about the South, among them Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, a recipient of the Jules F. Landry Award, and South-Watching: Selected Essays of Gerald W. Johnson, which won the Lillian Smith Award. He is co-editor of the last of Mencken's papers opened to the public, published in Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir by H. L. Mencken, available from Johns Hopkins.