Henry Louis Mencken was 18 when his father died.  It was a liberating experience for Henry.  The president of a family-owned cigar business, August Mencken fully expected Henry, or H.L. as he was later known, to continue the managerial lineage.  But H.L. Mencken wanted to be a newspaperman.  He later wrote about the death of his father:  “I remember well how, as I was trotting to [the physician’s] house on that night, I kept saying to myself that if my father died I’d be free at least.”  

The young Mencken was free. He set about making a nearly sixty-year-long career as a reporter, editorialist, polemicist, author and art and music critic.

H.L. Mencken, as a literary editor, exposed the United States to some of the great writers of the 20th Century including Theodore Drieser, Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  He editorialized on all of the national politicians and popular trends of the first half of the century and became the single biggest critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But Mencken was most famous for his coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial which pitted attorneys William Jennings Bryant and Clarence Darrow against each other in a courtroom challenge to a Tennessee biology teacher’s right to instruct on the theory of evolution. 

During his career, Mencken wrote over five million words in newspapers, books and magazines.  He put to paper the sentiments of the lost generation of skeptics by questioning everything most Americans took for granted from religion to social mores to business practices. 

Yet Mencken led the most routine of lives, living out all but five years of his days in the same house with his brother and raising hell within a workday that would remind observers more of a Baltimore banker’s life than of a social critic.

Terry Teachout explains Mencken’s daily routine in his biography of Mencken, The Skeptic:

“The daily details of his life were much the same in 1920 as they had been in 1910, for Mencken had become set in his ways long before he turned forty.  He arose each morning at eight, took a cold bath, breakfasted with Anna, Gertrude, and August (Charlie Mencken had married and moved away to Pennsylvania), then went back upstairs to his third-floor office-bedroom at nine and sifted through the incoming mail.  A near-compulsive correspondent, he wrote dozens of letters each morning, all of which he stamped and mail himself (his daily stroll to the corner mailbox was among his few forms of exercise).  He would start dictating his correspondence to a stenographer, but his other writings were banged out by hand on a Corona portable typewriter, a process that never failed to amuse those who saw his two-fingered style up close: ‘Mencken carried it to the extreme of parody, hitting the keys only with his tiny forefingers and spacing with his right elbow, a routine that made him look like a bear cub imitating a drum majorette.’  He corrected proofs, received visitors, ate lunch, paid an afternoon visit to the Sun at two o’clock sharp – one young staffer claimed that you could set your watch by his arrival – and came home afterward to read and nap on the office couch.  (Whenever possible he read lying down.)  After dinner he returned to his room to write, chew juicily on an unlit five-cent cigar as he covered page after page of the cheap copy paper he had been poaching from the Sun since 1906.  ‘My manuscript done on the typewriter is almost perfect,’ he boasted without exaggeration.  ‘I doubt that I average one correction to a page.  The heavy work I did for the Herald in my early days taught me to think before writing; it is my experience that most newspaper reporters work in the other direction.’  Precisely at ten o’clock he would put down his tools.  Sometimes he went out for a late-evening drink in a speakeasy with friends, but just as often he put on his glasses and handmade silk pajamas, retired to the sleeping porch behind his office, and spent an hour or two reading himself to sleep by gaslight.”