In essays celebrating the incomparable H.L. Mencken on the centenary of his birth, eight distinguished writers and editors consider various aspects of the man and his work - telling of his life, his writings, his prejudices, his passions, and his profound influence on American letters in the first half of this century. William Manchester writes on Mencken's last active year on the Baltimore Sun; Huntington Cairns, on his close association with his native Baltimore; Alistair Cooke, on Mencken's love affair with the American language; Charles A. Fecher, on the origins of his thought; Malcolm Moos, on Mencken's ideas and attitudes about politics; William H. Nolte, on his literary criticism; Carl Bode, on Mencken's life as revealed (and disguised) in his letters; and Alfred A. Knopf, on his own forty-year relationship with the Sage of Baltimore. Selections from Mencken's own writings accompany each essay, among them twenty-two letters published here for the first time, newspaper articles (including Mencken's report on Al Smith's defeat and his assessment of FDR's New Deal), book reviews and critical analyses (of the work of Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser), and excerpts from Mencken's memoirs (on receiving a printing press at age seven, on covering the great Baltimore fire of 1904). The result is a book that offers much pleasure and new insights to Mencken's admirers, and that will serve, for anyone not completely familiar with him, as a fine introduction to one of the most colorful and memorable figures in modern American letters. - Dust jacket.