The Smart Set: The Meaning and Meanness of Mencken: "His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that ‘obscure inner necessity’ of which Conrad tells us, the irrepressible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamored by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding."
That's the ever-entertaining, always-eloquent, mean-son-of-a-gun HL Mencken (professional critic, literary promoter, and Scopes Monkey Trial correspondent) on Theodore Dreiser. So densely poetic...
From one of my favorite daily reads of the moment, The Smart Set, which (not so) coincidentally, shares its name with Mencken's early 20th century literary journal (now defunct).
2 months ago
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