With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. Discovered among his private papers and edited by columnist Terry Teachout, this collection is full of the iconoclastic common sense that marked Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. This chrestomathy ("a collection of literary passages") incorporates writings about a variety of subjects: politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, and the brethren of the cloth.
- ISBN10 0679764070
- ISBN13 9780679764076
- Publish Date 26 September 1995 (first published 17 January 1995)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 20 May 2017
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Random House USA Inc
- Imprint Vintage Books
- Edition Annotated edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 491
- Language English