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| | elliott_mencken_01.htm |
 | | In the end, H. Mencken's writing, like that of all the great essayists, is valuable not so much for what it has to say (undeniably compelling though that often is) as for what it tells us about the character of the man who said it. |
 | | But to dismiss Mencken as a pure stylist, a Wodehouse-like juggler of shiny metaphors, is to ignore the fact that his attitude toward life is the point of his work. |
 | | At the heart of his critique of American life, for example, is his hatred of "the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its pervasive Philistinism," all of which he firmly believed to be intrinsic to the American national character. |
| www.mencken.org /files/text/elliott_mencken_01.htm (21314 words) |
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