The Sage of Baltimore, A Life of H.L. Mencken

Abstract

On a blazing hot Sunday afternoon in 1925, Henry Louis Mencken sat at his typewriter in a hotel room in Dayton, Tennessee, stripped to his underwear. While he pecked away in his usual manner, he paused occasionally only to light up another Uncle Willie cigar and to roar with laughter at his own writing. The dispatch he wrote to the Baltimore Evening Sun was inarguably some of his best work. Mencken's dispatch told in flowing prose of a visit he and a female journalist took to a Holy Roller revival in the hills outside of Dayton, where "the old-time religion was genuinely on tap." The dispatch, later edited and published as "The Hills of Zion," would be one of Mencken's most reprinted essays.¹