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Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was a German-American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English.〔.〕 Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. As a scholar Mencken is known for ''The American Language'', a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. His satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also earned him notoriety. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements. As an admirer of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a detractor of religion, populism and representative democracy, which he believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.〔 Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress, skeptical of economic theories and critical of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine. Mencken opposed American entry into World War I and World War II. His diary indicates that he harbored strong racist and anti-semitic attitudes, and was sympathetic to the Social Darwinism practiced by the Nazis.〔http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-05/news/mn-198_1_h-l-mencken〕 Mencken's longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore has been turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House. His papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. ==Early life== Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 12, 1880. He was the son of August Mencken, Sr., a cigar factory owner of German ancestry. When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street facing Union Square park in the Union Square neighborhood of old West Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his life.〔.〕 In his best-selling memoir ''Happy Days'', he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy."〔''Happy Days'', p. vii〕 When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's ''Huckleberry Finn'', which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life".〔St. Petersburg Times – September 23, 1987〕 He became determined to become a writer himself, and read voraciously. In one winter while in high school he read Thackeray and then "proceeded backward to Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Johnson and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century". He read the entire canon of Shakespeare, and became an ardent fan of Kipling and Thomas Huxley. As a boy, Mencken also had practical interests, photography and chemistry in particular, and eventually had a home chemistry laboratory which he used to perform experiments of his own devising, some of them inadvertently dangerous.〔''Newspaper Days, 1899–1906'', p. 58〕 He began his primary education in the mid-1880s at Professor Knapp's School located on the east side of Holliday Street between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the Holliday Street Theatre and across from the newly constructed Baltimore City Hall. The site today is the War Memorial and City Hall Plaza laid out in 1926 in memory of World War I dead. At fifteen, in June 1896, he graduated as valedictorian from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. BPI was a mathematics, technical and science-oriented public high school, founded in 1883, which was then located on old Courtland Street just north of East Saratoga Street. This location is today the east side of St. Paul Street in St. Paul Place and east of Preston Gardens. He worked for three years in his father's cigar factory. He disliked the work, especially the sales aspect of it, and resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898 he took a class in writing at one of the country's first correspondence schools (the Cosmopolitan University). This was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal education in journalism, or indeed in any other subject. On his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business reverted to his uncle and Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism. He had applied in February 1899 to the ''Morning Herald'' newspaper (which became the ''Baltimore Morning Herald'' in 1900), and had been hired as a part-timer there, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired on as a full-time reporter. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「H. L. Mencken」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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