Damning Words
The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Recounts a famously outspoken agnostic's surprising relationship with Christianity
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a reporter, literary critic, editor, author—and a famous American agnostic. From his role in the Scopes Trial to his advocacy of science and reason in public life, Mencken is generally regarded as one of the fiercest critics of Christianity in his day.
In this biography D. G. Hart presents a provocative, iconoclastic perspective on Mencken's life. Even as Mencken vividly debunked American religious ideals, says Hart, it was Christianity that largely framed his ideas, career, and fame. Mencken's relationship to the Christian faith was at once antagonistic and symbiotic.
Using plenty of Mencken's own words, Damning Words superbly portrays an influential figure in twentieth-century America and, at the same time, casts telling new light on his era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For this biography of prolific American writer H.L. Mencken, Hart (Calvinism: A History) depends so greatly on Mencken himself, as well as on other biographers and critics, that much of the book reads like a research paper with no specific aim. But then comes the conclusion, "Learning from H. L. Mencken," in which Hart resounds with purpose to drag a loudly unwilling Mencken into academe, church, and 21st-century politics and religion. Hart's chronological telling progresses doggedly from Mencken's birth in Baltimore in 1880 to death in 1956. Hart presents Mencken, baptized an Episcopalian, as reacting to the reserved Victorian culture of Christianity in which he came of age; although religious, he was more likely to wisecrack and parody cultural movements than suggest improvements. However, Hart concludes, Mencken's despair remains a "useful reminder of the antithetical character of Christianity" a religious tradition that fosters the creation of communities at the same time as instituting exclusionary beliefs and policies. Hart neither apologizes for quoting great gobs of Mencken nor competes with them, but he occasionally insinuates his own fillips amid persuasive analyses.
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