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A Partial Portrait |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Charles A. Fecher |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/2003 |
| Size: 1,684 Words, 10,153 Characters |
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THE SKEPTIC
A Life of H.L. Mencken
Terry Teachout
New York: HarperCollins, 2002
410 pp., $29.95
H.L. Mencken went to considerable pains to ensure that he would not soon be forgotten after his death in 1956. To the New York Public Library he bequeathed some four thousand large envelopes stuffed with much (though by no means all) of his correspondence, stipulating that they were to remain sealed for another fifteen years--that is, until 1971. To the Enoch Pratt Free Library in his own native Baltimore, he gave two separate sets of documents: one consisting of an eighteen-year diary and other literary papers sealed for twenty-five years (or until 1981), and the other of two lengthy, overlapping, and exhaustively annotated memoirs (Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work and My Life as Auth...
. . .
...ubtitle. It is true. The definitive life of Mencken has yet to appear. Until it does, we must be content to get along with what he calls, quoting Henry James, a "partial portrait," and a partial portrait is by its very terms incomplete. While waiting for the complete one, though, you can find no better way to get to know H.L. Mencken than in the pages of Terry Teachout's engaging, satisfying book.
(818 of 10,153 characters)
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