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Baltimore: This Weekend Is Mencken Weekend
Filed under: On the Spot Tagged: events, George Jean Nathan, H.L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken’s 128th birthday has come and gone (it was Wednesday). We may have missed it, but the Mencken Society has a slew of rousing events scheduled this weekend celebrating the great freethinking writer and editor. You’ve got to love a crank so cranky he published a book dedicated to criticizing himself; it was called Menckeneanea: A Schimpflexikon. (Schimpflexikon is German and means something like “dictionary of disgrace.”)
There’s a lecture on Mencken and George Jean Nathan, there’s a preview of the George H. Thompson Mencken Collection, and former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis will be speaking.
Most of the events seem to be on Saturday, September 15. You can contact the society’s president, Edward A. Martin, for more info. —Martin Schneider
Comments
My little brother Henry was named after H.L. Mencken when Wolfgang Amadeus was vetoed by my mother! We always assumed H.L. must have been an awful man, since our dad loved him so much. (Dad loves nothing but Beethoven, Mozart, Nixon, Reagan, Fox 5 News, his own “hard earned” money, William F. Buckley, and the Marine Band). But knowing he’s done his own “dictionary of disgrace” makes us feel a little better about him. :)