Category: Feature

The Free Lance column will be published at 00:01 (one minute after midnight) on its anniversary date. The Evening Sun was published six days a week, Monday through Friday.

The Free Lance, May 8, 1911.

There is a nice illustrated version of Henry Milner Rideout’s Dragon’s Blood (Houghton-Mifflin, 1909) available from Project Gutenberg. From Smart Set 28(3):153-160 (1909-07) [546 words]: [Dragon’s Blood is] a novel of great merit and greater promise. A hundred journeyman fictioneers might have imagined the story it tells, but a distressingly small number, even among the…

Mr Mencken on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as performed by Dr John C. “Chuck” Chalberg, professor of history at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. For more on Mr Mencken’s opinion of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, see “Mark Twain: Popularity Index” and “Our One Authentic Giant” in William H. Nolte, H. L. Mencken’s Smart…

Oliver Platt reads Mr Mencken’s “The Politician”. The piece can be found in the Chrestomathy and is an adaptation of Mr Mencken’s lecture before the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, January 4, 1940.

In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Donald Kirkley on June 30, 1948, the ombibulous Mr Mencken comments on alcoholic beverages and offers timeless advice on how to enjoy alcohol.

Eighty-seven years ago subscribers to the American Mercury were receiving the April number of the magazine little knowing that 2,943 words occupying not quite four-and-a-half pages would create an anti-censorship tempest-in-a-teapot. The banning in Boston of the article titled “Hatrack” made the front page of the Sun but was sent to pages in the mid-twenties…