Literature that transports you to the Golden Era

[LizzieMaine]

Mencken's greatest achievement, and the one which will deservedly survive when all his polemics have been forgotten is his magesterial three volume study "The American Language." I have all three volumes, in 1930s-40s editions, and it's a set I'll often just sit down and read for pleasure. No politics, no bitter-old-man fulminations, no cruelty for the sake of a joke, just a careful and measured study of how and why we talk and write the way we do, or at least the way we talked and wrote from the 18th century thru the first decades of the 20th. If you love words, these books belong unapologetically on your shelf.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
I happen to have the abridged version, all in one heavy volume, published in 1963.

Mencken was not a trained linguist; he had no post-secondary education at all. But he understood a thing or two about how language actually works, which isn’t how the prescriptivist prigs would have it.

As Twain put it, “There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares.”

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I scored the Gotham's superfecta yesterday and to celebrate I found The American Language hardcover edition
on Amazon for six shillings and change. The two other volumes will be nabbed later.

Never read this American so more from his canon---any suggestions where to start?

 

[tonyb]

Mencken's greatest achievement, and the one which will deservedly survive when all his polemics have been forgotten is his magesterial three volume study "The American Language." I have all three volumes, in 1930s-40s editions, and it's a set I'll often just sit down and read for pleasure. No politics, no bitter-old-man fulminations, no cruelty for the sake of a joke, just a careful and measured study of how and why we talk and write the way we do, or at least the way we talked and wrote from the 18th century thru the first decades of the 20th. If you love words, these books belong unapologetically on your shelf.

Maybe so.

Mencken was a man of his times. Characters even more prominent in his day (and ours, alas) held similarly bigoted views, and expressed them in far less cleverly cloaked terms. (Selections from his diary, which saw first light 25 years after his death, and personal letters are far more explicit in their venom.)

Recognizing his prodigious talent for what it was in no way changes any of that. His essays might be read today for what they tell us about his times in our nation and their echoes in ours.

And a person looking to hone his writing skills might take a lesson from it. Even Hitler liked dogs, right?