Elegant Common Sense

This exuberant collection of H. L. Mencken's reviews and short essays—most of them previously unassembled—will agitate, annoy, and thrill any thoughtful reader. Though the bulk of these literary pieces were written from 1910 to 1930, Mencken remains a breathtaking, beguiling critic, and—along with Edmund Wilson, probably Gore Vidal, and possibly John Updike—one of the few twentieth-century American men of letters whose reviews will be read throughout this century (as Mencken wrote of Huckleberry Finn ) "not as a solemn duty, but for the honest love of it, and over and over again." Mencken could be exasperatingly wrong (see, for instance, his complete misreading of The Age of Innocence ), but even then it is delightful to read so intelligent and honest a writer at work.

Although this will (I hope) be the only occasion when these two figures find themselves in the same review, Theodor Adorno wrote that "luck and ...