Mount Vernon Literary Tour: H. L. Mencken

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at 704 Cathedral Street Transcript: He’s no longer a household name, but Henry Louis Mencken (b. 1880, d. 1956) was the nation’s most influential journalist and cultural critic in the first half of the 20th century. The lifelong Baltimorean lived in an apartment here during his five-year marriage to Sara Haardt, who died in 1935. Known as “The Sage of Baltimore,” the cigar-chomping newspaperman wrote thousands of columns for the Baltimore Sun. As an editor of cutting-edge national magazines, Mencken befriended and promoted Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other authors he felt brought a welcome realism to American writing. Though he was susceptible to the prejudices of his day, his magazine American Mercury was the first edited by whites to publish Black writers like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Mencken was renowned for his cynical witticisms. Here's one: "It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."