The Atlantic Monthly culls its archives for an impressive presentation on the legendary editor, linguist, critic and Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken.

Meantime, NRO offers a review of the new Mencken biography and a Q&A with its author.

For more on Mencken, some worthy pages:

The Mencken Society

A Mencken Cornucopia

H.L. Mencken Quotes

From the latter, a small sampling, still resonant, to delight the campus skeptic:

The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become pedagogues. Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the weaknesses of the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys take seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.

When the American pedagogue became a professional, and began to acquire a huge armamentarium of technic, the trade of teaching declined, for only inferior men were willing to undergo a long training in obvious balderdash.

But in English even the higher ranks of professors tend to be inferior to those of any other faculty. The papers printed in [the journals] seldom show any professional competence or contribute anything worth knowing to the subject. For the most part they consist wholly of dull pedantries--attempts to establish the dates of some forgotten poet, investigations of the stealings of one obscure author from another, elaborate statistical inquiries into weak endings, and so on and so on. The standards of professional research and writings in the United States are anything but high, but it would certainly be unusual to find any similar rubbish in a journal of chemistry, astronomy or zoology, or even in a medical journal. The men who actually know something always know the difference between something and nothing, but the professors of English seem to be largely unaware of it. ...they devote themselves ardently to irrelevant trivia about the writers of the past, many of them existing today only as flies embalmed in the amber of text-books.