Abstract
Gilbert Seldes almost single-handedly brought the highest of highbrow modernism into the United States by publishing T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the Dial magazine in November 1922, but when this critic looked back on American literary culture of the interwar years, he mainly remembered H. L. Mencken. As Seldes explained, ‘Mencken influenced the minds of thousands of young people when they were in or recently out of college. In that sense, he took part in creating the climate of the time.’1 While Seldes clearly associated H. L. Mencken with major cultural movements, he qualified this influence in an interesting way, adding, ‘As far as ideas and the arts were concerned, he had an effect on the intellectual climate – here using intellectual in its looser sense.’2
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Notes
2. Gilbert Seldes, typescript, qtd. in Michael Kammen (1996) The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 389
3. Paul Hervey Fox (January 1917) ‘The Pirates of Virtue’, Smart Set, 169–174; Anthony Wharton (April 1917) ‘Lady Marjory’s Undies’, Smart Set, 131–150. Sharon Hamilton 145
4. H. L. Mencken (1993) My Life as Author and Editor ed. and with an introduction by Jonathan Yardley (New York: Knopf), p. 381. Quotations from the writings of H. L. Mencken used by permission of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of Mr Mencken’s bequest.
Richard Ohmann (1996) Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn-of-the-Century (London and New York: Verso).
8. H. L. Mencken (November 1908) ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Best Sellers’, Smart Set, 159
Edmund Wilson ([1968] 1973) ‘The Aftermath of Mencken’, The Devils and Canon Barham (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), p. 94.
14. Edmund Wilson (1947) ‘H. L. Mencken’, in Edmund Wilson (ed.) The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It (New York: Doubleday), p. 1156
John Mason Brown (13 April 1958) ‘Critic’s View of A Critic’, New York Times, Sec. 2, 3.
Ben Hecht (1965) ‘About Mencken’, Letters from Bohemia (London: Hammond, Hammond, and Co.), p. 71.
17. John Unterecker ((1969) 1970) Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: Anthony Blond), p. 91.
18. Sherwood Anderson ((1942) 1969) in Ray Lewis White (ed.) Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 369.
StuartP Sherman (1922) ‘Mr. Mencken, the Jeune Fille, and the New Spirit in Letters’, Americans (New York: Scribner’s), pp. 7, 1
Anita Loos (1966) A Girl Like I (New York: Viking), p. 213.
Richard Wright (1945) Black Boy (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 270–272 qtd. in Fred Hobson (1994) Mencken: A Life (New York: Random House), p. 250.
Wayne F. Cooper (1987) Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Schocken Books), p. 159.
James Weldon Johnson (1973) Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Da Capo Press), p. 305. For more on Mencken’s relationships with African-American writers see Charles Scruggs (1984) The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
John Leonard (2000) New York Times Book Review qtd in Ben Yagoda (2001) About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Da Capo Press), p. 12.
John Dos Passos (1932; 1960) U.S.A. (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 405
27. George Guest (11 November 1917) ‘Pistols for Two’, Knickerbocker Press, H. L. Mencken Scrapbooks, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (November 1921) ‘ “Poor Old Marriage”: Review of Charles G. Norris’ Brass’ in The Bookman 54, 253–254 repr. in Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer (eds) (1971) F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time (Toronto: Popular Library), p. 126
30. The Editors (1922) ‘Apologia’, The Laughing Horse (Berkeley: University of California), p. 2.
32. (H. L. Mencken) (June 1923) ‘Criticism Again’, Smart Set, 33
34. H. L. Mencken (May 1923) ‘Nordic Blond Art’, Smart Set, 143
Shin-Kap Han (Winter 2003) ‘Unraveling the Brow:What and How of Choice in Musical Preference’, Sociological Perspectives, 46, 435–459.
Mark S. Morrisson (2001) The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 133.
George Douglas (1991) The Smart Magazines (Hamden: Archon).
Alfred Kazin (1978) New York Jew (New York: Knopf), p. 6.
49. Jim Benning (9 August 2007) ‘Drexel University Launches “The Smart Set” ‘http://www.worldhum.comdate accessed 11 December 2010
Owen Hatteras (6 August 2007) ‘Pertinent and Impertinent: Letter from the Ombudsman’, The Smart Sethttp://thesmartset.com date accessed 11 December 2010
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© 2012 Sharon Hamilton
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Hamilton, S. (2012). ‘Intellectual in Its Looser Sense’: Reading Mencken’s Smart Set. In: Brown, E., Grover, M. (eds) Middlebrow Literary Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354647_9
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