December 05, 2002
Exaggerating your subject's precociousness, the New Yorker way! (from Joan Acocella's review of Terry Teachout's "The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken")
Henry Louis Mencken was born in 1880, in Baltimore, of German stock. As he told it, he had a serene childhood, digging in the back yard and reading great stacks of nineteenth-century literature.Wow, I wonder where Mencken could have possibly acquired a taste for nineteenth-century literature...in the nineteenth freaking century?!
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