Overview
In 1918, Henry Louis Mencken was editing The Smart Set in New York, to which he traveled weekly, and working on The American Language in his native Baltimore. Philip Goodman, a New York advertising man, bon vivant, and fledgling publisher, later to be a Broadway impresario, became Mencken's closest friend. Knowing Mencken was depressed about the German-American community in the aftermath of the First World War, Goodman offered cheer in a letter "reminiscing" about their old German-American neighborhood in the 1880s and 1890s. (Goodman actually had grown up in Philadelphia). He invented characters and events and wrote with irony and affection for those better times. Mencken rose instantly to the challenge and wrote a letter in similar vein. For three years, these correspondents tried to out-do each other in telling tall tales and catching the flavor of German-America in the late nineteenth century. Since Mencken's death in 1956 fragments and copies of the letters have reposed in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.
This item is Non-Returnable
Customers Also Bought
Details
- ISBN-13: 9780938420545
- ISBN-10: 0938420542
- Publisher: Maryland Center for History and Culture
- Publish Date: January 1976
- Dimensions: 8.24 x 6.36 x 0.81 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
- Page Count: 208
Related Categories
