The legendary H. L. Mencken exists solely in the minds of his hostile critics and his least intelligent admirers, who have derived their impression of him from his opponents rather than from himself.-from H. L. MenckenIn this spirited exploration of the career of H. L. Mencken, Ernest Boyd looks at the controversial journalist and freethinker as an American and quintessential Baltimorean ("whenever he is guilty of the slightest treason against Baltimore, he hastens to make amends"), as a philosopher and contradictory defender of Nietzsche, and as a critic, "hard-working hedonist and champion of the plutocracy, romantic survivor of the age of American innocence." Boyd leaves no doubt as to why Mencken is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century.American author ERNEST BOYD (1887-1946) was born in Dublin but began his literary career in New York City in 1920. Among his works of commentary, criticism, and translation Portraits, Real and Imaginary (1924), Guy de Maupassant (1926), and Literary Blasphemies (1927).