Professor H L Mencken

The Free Lance, May-August 1911 Professor H L Mencken

On May 8, 1911, H. L. Mencken began a column in the Baltimore Evening Sun entitled "The World in Review." The next day he retitled it "The Free Lance"-and continued writing the column six days a week for the next four and a half years. This enormous body of work, totalling about 1200 columns and amounting to 1.5 million words, is an incredibly rich storehouse of Mencken's opinions on a wide array of topics. In some columns he addresses serious issues: the distressing prevalence of typhoid in the larger American cities, including Baltimore; the pestiferious influence of the Anti-Saloon League in promoting prohibition of alcoholic beverages; and all manner of political malfeasance both locally and nationally. But in most of his columns he displays his pungent satirical wit, lampooning poetasters, self-righteous moralists, and political and literary hacks of every description. In several columns Mencken begins outlining his views of the "American language," the distinctive slang that Americans have adopted as a departure from formal English; Mencken later wrote a landmark treatise on the subject. Throughout these columns, H. L. Mencken displays the perspicacity and penchant for humor and satire that made him the greatest journalist of his day.