Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken
by .Harper. $3.75.
Written with an élan worthy of its subject and with irreverent wit, this is a very entertaining but far from definitive biogruphy of Mencken. Mr. Manchester, a young newspaperman, managed to enlist his subject s coöperation, with the result that he has given us a very full account of Mencken’s life. The book would have been a lot better if the author’s eyes hadn’t been slightly glazed with admiration; and while Mencken’s ideas — his “philosophical anarchism married to the rankest Toryism” — are expounded with spirit and with copious quotation from his writings, they are not very seriously criticized, nor is Mencken’s influence more than lightly evaluated.
The biography does, however, handsomely communicate the fun and furor of the period in which Mencken was so boisterously chastising the Comstocks, the boosters, and the boobs.