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Editor, writer; born in Baltimore, Md. He left school after his father's death (1899) to become a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, later serving as drama critic, city editor, and then managing editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald . Soon after the Herald folded in 1906, he joined the Baltimore Sun; he remained associated with the Sun as editor, columnist, or contributor for most of his career, but he also wrote for many other publications. Early on, Mencken published studies of George Bernard Shaw (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), both of whom he admired. From 1914 to 1923, with George Jean Nathan he coedited a satirical magazine, The Smart Set; in 1924 he and Nathan cofounded the American Mercury, a cultural magazine for "a civilized minority," which he coedited for nine years. Social rebels admired Mencken's clever, iconoclastic attacks on the middle-class "booboisie," prudery, and organized religion and politics. As a reviewer and critic he lambasted second-rate authors and championed such writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis , and Joseph Conrad . Many of his essays and reviews were collected in six volumes of Prejudices (1919--27). In a different vein, his detailed study, The American Language (1919), traced the developments of a distinctive American idiom. During the 1930s, Mencken's cynicism and his antipathy to the New Deal appeared less in tune with the times, and he turned more toward the past, writing three volumes of memoirs, beginning with Happy Days (1940). He also added two supplements to his American Language (1945, 1946). A stroke in 1948 left him incapacitated during his last years.