H. L. Mencken at typewriter at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, June 1936 (Photo: Enoch Pratt Free Library)
“At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show.”—H.L. Mencken, from Newspaper Days
Baltimore’s literary roots are deep ones. The authors who lived and worked here include Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Dashiell Hammett, and novelist Anne Tyler still calls it home. H.L. Mencken, the curmudgeonly “Sage of Baltimore,” remains perhaps the writer most closely connected to the place. There’s no more appropriate way to mark Baltimore’s annual Mencken Day than by joining arts journalist Richard Selden on a tour of sites connected to the city’s rich heritage of writing.
Visit Poe’s grave and the Poe House and Museum, hear Laura Claridge—biographer of Norman Rockwell, Emily Post, and Blanche Knopf—speak about Mencken, then join members of the Mencken Society for a German-style dinner that celebrates their namesake at the West Hamilton Street Club, where writers John Dos Passos, Ogden Nash, and William Manchester were members.
Fringe stop at about 8:55 a.m.
