Remembering H. L. Mencken

One of the few worthwhile collections of H. L. Mencken’s newspaper writing, as it appeared originally in The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, emerged in 1991 under the title The Impossible H.L. Mencken. In an otherwise laudatory review, Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley called the book’s title “silly.” “To call H.L. Mencken ‘impossible’ is excessively cute and unwittingly condescending,” he sniffed.