The Sage of Baltimore

Writing in Reason, Damon W. Root discusses a new edition of Mencken. An excerpt:

On July 27, 1925, the great journalist and literary critic H.L. Mencken published his obituary for the left-wing populist, Christian fundamentalist, and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in the Baltimore Evening Sun. “Imagine a gentleman,” Mencken wrote, “and you have imagined everything that he was not.” Bryan had been “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all beauty, all fine and noble things.” Mencken practically danced on his grave.