Happy Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1880-1892 (Volume 1) (Bumcombe Collection) - Softcover

Mencken, H. L. L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801885310 ISBN 13: 9780801885310

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

Most of these autobiographical writings first appeared in the New Yorker. Here Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

A book to be read twice a year by young and old, as long as life lasts.

(Atlantic)

A chronicle of childhood for which truth and a sense of balance have long been clamoring. To say it is a readable book is an impertinence in the case of Mr. Mencken.

(New York Times)

Probably no man alive more guilelessly enjoys hearing himself talk on paper, or is better able to infect others with the pleasure, than Henry Louis Mencken... Good old Mencken bravura at its brassiest. For all its mannerisms and unsubtlties the Mencken vernacular is extraordinarily vigorous and fine.

(Time)

The basis of the book's delight is that the Baltimore of the days when Cleveland was president and soft crabs sold for two and a fraction cents a piece... is miraculously seen again through the eyes of a secure young savage of the more fortunate bourgeoisie.

(Saturday Review)

Happy Days enjoys a throne of honors atop that vaunted heap of letters... Gleeful, doxological passages on the glories of an uncomplicated young life crowd this first volume.

(Brendan O'Donnell Ex Libris)

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0801885310
• ISBN 13: 9780801885310
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336