The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken , by Terry Teachout. HarperCollins, 410 pages, $29.95.
It’s tempting, when trying to give a sense of H.L. Mencken’s place in American literature, to reach for lofty comparisons. Alistair Cooke called him the American Voltaire; he was also a popularizer of ideas like Shaw, a foe of religion Read More
Poems of New York , edited by Elizabeth Schmidt. Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $12.50.
Globalization, we often hear, is making every place identical, Jakarta just another version of Toronto. But in poetry, at least, cities are guaranteed their own distinctive lives. Literature preserves them at the moment not necessarily of their greatest Read More
Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius , by Barbara Belford. Random House, 381 pages, $29.95.
The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde , edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. Henry Holt, 1,270 pages, $45.
When Oscar Wilde landed at New York harbor on Jan. 2, 1882, he had written almost nothing. The works on which Read More
Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy , by Frances Kiernan. W.W. Norton & Company, 845 pages, $35.
Mary McCarthy was a tactician of scandal; she had a sure sense of just how much would be good for her. She learned this early on. In her freshman English class at Vassar, students’ papers were Read More
Later Auden , by Edward Mendelson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pages, $30.
In the late 1940′s, W.H. Auden became enamored of the idea that every writer’s mind is a household containing three personalities. T.S. Eliot’s, he wrote, included an archdeacon, an old peasant grandmother and a young boy who liked to play practical jokes. Read More
