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ellauri097.html on line 107: Like Nietzsche, he also lambasted religious belief and the very concept of Cod, as Mencken was an unflinching atheist, particularly Christian fundamentalism, Christian Science and creationism, and against the "Booboisie," his word for the ignorant middle classes. In the summer of 1925, he attended the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, and wrote scathing columns for the Baltimore Sun (widely syndicated) and American Mercury mocking the anti-evolution Fundamentalists (especially William Jennings Bryan). The play Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized version of the trial, and as noted above the cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck is based on Mencken. In 1926, he deliberately had himself arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury, which was banned in Boston by the Comstock laws. Mencken heaped scorn not only on the public officials he disliked but also on the state of American elective politics itself.
ellauri097.html on line 113: In the summer of 1926, Mencken followed with great interest the Los Angeles grand jury inquiry into the famous Canadian-American evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was accused of faking her reported kidnapping and the case attracted national attention. There was every expectation that Mencken would continue his previous pattern of anti-fundamentalist articles, this time with a searing critique of McPherson. Unexpectedly, he came to her defense by identifying various local religious and civic groups that were using the case as an opportunity to pursue their respective ideological agendas against the embattled Pentecostal minister. He spent several weeks in Hollywood, California, and wrote many scathing and satirical columns on the movie industry and Southern California culture. After all charges had been dropped against McPherson, Mencken revisited the case in 1930 with a sarcastic and observant article. He wrote that since many of that town´s residents had acquired their ideas "of the true, the good and the beautiful" from the movies and newspapers, "Los Angeles will remember the testimony against her long after it forgets the testimony that cleared her."
ellauri097.html on line 167: His later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays that were first published in The New Yorker and then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days. Mencken was preoccupied with his legacy and kept his papers, letters, newspaper clippings, columns, and even grade school report cards. After his death, those materials were made available to scholars in stages in 1971, 1981, and 1991 and include hundreds of thousands of letters sent and received. The only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
ellauri107.html on line 106: In 1963, Mailer wrote two regular columns: one on religion called "Responses and Reactions" for Commentary and one called "Big Bite" for Esquire. Mailer also divorced from his third wife Jeanne Campbell and met Beverly Bentley who would become his fourth wife. Bentley had known Hemingway in Spain and briefly dated Miles Davis in New York before she met Mailer. Bentley and Mailer took a long car trip, notably visited an army buddy "Fig" Gwaltney in Arkansas, viewed an autopsy of a cancer victim, watched the Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight in Las Vegas, and spent time with the Beats in San Francisco. While in San Francisco, Mailer "walked narrow ledges, testing his nerve and balance".
ellauri107.html on line 458: he have any doctrine about preacher-mayors laid down for him, so he grunted and went on. She looked sympathetic and did not hear a word. Later she would read the headlines, the society columns, and the department-store advertisements.
ellauri107.html on line 477: The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below. The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskeller. The members rush into the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn't much time for it. Thus did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he whooped, “How's the boys? How's the boys? Well, well, fine day!”
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