Prejudices, second series — Key Ideas to Explore

The Autopsy as Genre

The essay on Roosevelt, subtitled 'An Autopsy,' is the volume's most sustained performance in a mode Mencken perfected: the posthumous vivisection of a public figure. He does not narrate Roosevelt's life; instead, he dissects his style. Mencken notes Roosevelt's 'gigantic gusto' and 'superb aliveness' but immediately undercuts these with a catalog of defects: 'blatant, crude, overly confidential, devious, tyrannical, vainglorious, sometimes quite childish.' The rhythm of the list—short, blunt, accelerating—mimics a prosecutor's summation. Mencken's key insight is that Roosevelt's errors stemmed from his audience: 'aspiring to be the leader of a nation of third-rate men, he had to stoop to the common level.' This is not biography but a diagnosis of democratic leadership's inherent compromises.

The South as Negative Space

'The Sahara of the Bozart' is Mencken's most famous essay in this collection, and its title announces its method: a vast, barren region defined by absence. He opens with a couplet from the obscure J. Gordon Coogler—'Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer'—and uses it as a launching pad for a catalogue of cultural deprivation. The prose itself enacts the emptiness it describes: long, sweeping sentences that accumulate examples of what the South lacks—poets, oboe-players, dry-point etchers, metaphysicians. Mencken's strategy is to define a culture by its deficits, a risky approach that succeeds through sheer rhetorical force. He compares the region to 'interstellar spaces' and 'the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether,' pushing the metaphor until it becomes absurd, then doubling down.

Pace and the Polemical Sentence

Mencken's sentences are his primary weapon, and their rhythms vary with his target. In the Roosevelt essay, he uses short, staccato clauses to convey impatience: 'The man was blatant, crude, overly confidential...' In 'The Sahara of the Bozart,' he favors longer, cumulative structures that mimic the sweep of his contempt. A typical sentence might begin with a flat assertion, then add qualifications, then pivot to a mocking simile, all before reaching the period. This syntactic restlessness keeps the reader off-balance, never sure whether the next clause will deliver a fact or a sneer. Mencken also varies paragraph length dramatically: a single, devastating sentence can stand alone as a paragraph, while others run to half a page of layered invective. The effect is of a mind working in real time, testing each idea before discarding it.

Readers approaching Prejudices, Second Series should attend to Mencken's tonal shifts: he can move from scholarly quotation to gutter slang within a single paragraph. The essays reward attention to his use of dashes, parentheses, and italics—typographical cues that signal irony or emphasis. Because the excerpts are incomplete, one cannot judge how Mencken structures longer arguments, but the pattern of opening with a specific text or figure and then expanding outward is consistent. Treat each essay as a performance, not a treatise; the pleasure is in watching the prose coil and strike.

Reading Mencken again, I keep noticing how he nails the moment when outrage curdles into weariness. It came back to me while leafing through old newspaper writing—the same fingerprints of haste and self-regard he deplored. There’s a strange comfort in The American Newspaper — Edition Insights, recognizing the echo. Some flaws are so permanent they feel almost like old friends, waiting quietly on the shelf between us and yesterday.