Download or read book The Editor the Bluenose and the Prostitute written by Henry Louis Mencken and published by Roberts Rinehart Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H.L. Mencken's account of his censorship court case in 1926 with the New England Watch and Ward Society and its spokesman, J. Frank Chase.
Download or read book Reading the Obscene written by Jordan Carroll and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Reading the Obscene, Jordan Carroll reveals new insights about the editors who fought the most famous anti-censorship battles of the twentieth century. While many critics have interpreted obscenity as a form of populist protest, Reading the Obscene shows that the editors who worked to dismantle censorship often catered to elite audiences composed primarily of white men in the professional-managerial class. As Carroll argues, transgressive editors, such as H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set and the American Mercury, William Gaines and Al Feldstein at EC Comics, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Along the way, these editors kicked off a middle-class sexual revolution in which white-collar professionals imagined they could control sexuality through management science. Obscenity is often presented as self-shattering and subversive, but with this provocative work Carroll calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order. Winner of the 2022 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, sponsored by the Modern Language Association
Download or read book Banned in Boston written by Neil Miller and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively history of the Watch and Ward Society--New England's notorious literary censor for over eighty years. Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society--once Boston's unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society's upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays. A spectacular romp through the Puritan City, here Neil Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase "banned in Boston."
Download or read book Diary of H L Mencken written by H.L. Mencken and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. L. Mencken's diary was, at his own request, kept sealed in the vaults of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library for a quarter of a century after his death. The diary covers the years 1930 -- 1948, and provides a vivid, unvarnished, sometimes shocking picture of Mencken himself, his world, and his friends and antagonists, from Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner to Franklin D. Roosevelt, for whom Mencken nourished a hatred that resulted in spectacular and celebrated feats of invective. From the more than 2,000 pages of typescript that have now come to light, the Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher has made a generous selection of entries carefully chosen to preserve the whole range, color, and impact of the diary. Here, full scale, is Mencken the unique observer and disturber of American society. And here too is Mencken the human being of wildly contradictory impulses: the skeptic who was prey to small superstitions, the dare-all warrior who was a hopeless hypochondriac, the loving husband and generous friend who was, alas, a bigot. Mencken emerges from these pages unretouched -- in all the often outrageous gadfly vitality that made him, at his brilliant best, so important to the intellectual fabric of American life
Download or read book Mencken written by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the definitive biography of Mencken, the most illuminating book ever published about this giant of American letters. We see the prominent role he played in the Scopes Monkey Trial, his long crusade against Prohibition, his fierce battles against press censorship, and his constant exposure of pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining the shape of American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes.
Download or read book Damning Words written by Hart, D. G. and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2016 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts a famously outspoken agnostic's surprising relationship with Christianity H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was a reporter, literary critic, editor, author--and a famous American agnostic. From his role in the Scopes Trial to his advocacy of science and reason in public life, Mencken is generally regarded as one of the fiercest critics of Christianity in his day. In this biography D. G. Hart presents a provocative, iconoclastic perspective on Mencken's life. Even as Mencken vividly debunked American religious ideals, says Hart, it was Christianity that largely framed his ideas, career, and fame. Mencken's relationship to the Christian faith was at once antagonistic and symbiotic. Using plenty of Mencken's own words, Damning Words superbly portrays an influential figure in twentieth-century America and, at the same time, casts telling new light on his era.
Download or read book Mencken written by Fred Hobson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever in control, H. L. Mencken contrived that future generations would see his life as he desired them to. He even wrote Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and other books to fit the pictures he wanted: first, the carefree Baltimore boy; then, the delighted, exuberant critic of American life. But he only told part of the truth. Over the past twenty-five years, vital collections of the writer's papers have become available, including his literary correspondence, a 2,100-page diary, equally long manuscripts about his literary and journalistic careers, and numerous accumulations of his personal correspondence. The letters and diaries of Mencken's intimates have been uncovered as well. Now Fred Hobson has used this newly accessible material to fashion the first truly comprehensive portrait of this most original of American originals. NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
Download or read book Banned in the Media written by Herbert N. Foerstel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1998-05-26 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From colonial times to the present, the media in America has been subject to censorship challenges and regulations. This comprehensive reference guide to media censorship provides in-depth coverage of each media format—newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, radio, television, and the Internet—all of which have been, and continue to be, battlegrounds for First Amendment issues. Each media format is examined in-depth, from its origins and history through its modern development, and features discussion of landmark incidents and cases. Foerstel, author of Banned in the U.S.A., the acclaimed reference guide to book censorship in schools and public libraries, offers a brief history of media censorship, examines in-depth the drama of seven landmark incidents, and includes 31 relevant court cases. Complementing the volume are personal interviews with prominent victims of media censorship, who give human voice to the struggle of the media to remain free, and an examination of censorship of the student press. Fascinating examples of media censorship abound, from Peter Zenger's prerevolutionary trial for seditious libel to the modern tobacco industry's invocation of tortious interference to silence television news and the current rash of Internet censorship incidents. Chapter 1 offers a brief history of censorship of each of the media types. Chapter 2 features indepth analysis of seven landmark media censorship incidents: the trial of John Peter Zenger, H. L. Mencken and the hatrack case, John Henry Faulk and the radio blacklist, Progressive magazine's expos^D'e on the H-bomb secret, government labeling of three documentary films as political propaganda, television's tobacco wars, and Carnegie Mellon's attempt to censor students' access to the Internet. Chapter 3 examines 31 media censorship court cases from 1735 to 1997. Chapter 4 features exclusive interviews with media figures involved in censorship issues or cases—Paul Jarrico, Howard Morland, Peter Sussman, Daniel Schorr, Walter Cronkite, and Jerry Berman. Appendix A takes a look at censorship and response regarding the student press during the 1990s, after the landmark Hazelwood decision in 1988—an important topic for students in every high school. Appendix B contains a resource list of media advocacy and censorship organizations. A selected bibliography of books and electronic resources completes the text. This volume is of interest to high school and college students, teachers, librarians and scholars, and all those who are affected by these crucial First Amendment issues.
Download or read book Stanley Marcus written by David R. Farmer and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randall (English and drama, Duke U.) demonstrates that drama lived on under the English Commonwealth despite the official ban on the theater. He describes how plays continued to be wrought, translated, transmuted, published, bought, read, and even covertly performed. He also shows how drama became more topical and political during the period. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Bookleggers and Smuthounds written by Jay A. Gertzman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-02 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the two world wars, at a time when both sexual repression and sexual curiosity were commonplace, New York was the center of the erotic literature trade in America. The market was large and contested, encompassing not just what might today be considered pornographic material but also sexually explicit fiction of authors such as James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, and D.H. Lawrence; mail-order manuals; pulp romances; and "little dirty comics." Bookleggers and Smuthounds vividly brings to life this significant chapter in American publishing history, revealing the subtle, symbiotic relationship between the publishers of erotica and the moralists who attached them—and how the existence of both groups depended on the enduring appeal of prurience. By keeping intact the association of sex with obscenity and shameful silence, distributors of erotica simultaneously provided the antivice crusaders with a public enemy. Jay Gertzman offers unforgettable portrayals of the "pariah capitalists" who shaped the industry, and of the individuals, organizations, and government agencies that sought to control them. Among the most compelling personalities we meet are the notorious publisher Samuel Roth, "the Prometheus of the Unprintable," and his nemesis, John Sumner, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a man aggressive in his pursuit of pornographers and in his quest for a morally united—and ethnically homogeneous—America.
Download or read book The New England Watch and Ward Society written by P. C. Kemeny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of the Protestant establishment's prominent role in late nineteenth-century public life and its confrontation with modernity, commercial culture, and cultural pluralism in early twentieth-century America. Elite liberal Protestants, typically considered progressive, urbane, and tolerant, established the Watch and Ward Society in 1878 to suppress literature they deemed obscene, notably including Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. These self-appointed custodians of Victorian culture enjoyed widespread support from many of New England's most renowned ministers, distinguished college presidents, respected social reformers, and wealthy philanthropists. In the 1880s, the Watch and Ward Society expanded its efforts to regulate public morality by attacking gambling and prostitution. The society not only expressed late nineteenth-century Victorian American values about what constituted "good literature," sexual morality, and public duty, it also embodied Protestants' efforts to promote these values in an increasingly intellectually and culturally diverse society. By 1930, the Watch and Ward Society had suffered a very public fall from grace. Following controversies over the suppression of H.L. Mencken's American Mercury as well as popular novels such as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, cultural modernists, civil libertarians, and publishers attacked the moral reform movement, ridiculing its leaders' privileged backgrounds, social idealism, and religious commitments. Their critique reshaped the dynamics of Protestant moral reform activity as well as public discourse in subsequent decades. For more than a generation, however, the Watch and Ward Society expressed mainline Protestant attitudes toward literature, gambling, and sexuality.
Download or read book H L Mencken written by S. T. Joshi and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baltimore native Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an essayist, literary critic, magazine editor, novelist, and journalist. Starting as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the century, Mencken eventually became associated with the Baltimore Sun and his work for the newspaper spanned five decades. In H.L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography, S.T. Joshi provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive bibliography of the writings of H. L. Mencken ever assembled. It presents detailed information on his book publications from 1903 to the present, with a full list of editions and reprints. Most significantly, it presents for the first time a comprehensive annotated listing of his magazine and newspaper work (including more than 1,500 anonymous editorials for the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Evening Sun, and other papers, which have never been listed in any previous bibliographies), a thorough index to his book reviews, and a full list of interviews Mencken gave during his lifetime. Word counts of nearly every item in the bibliography have been supplied, and the book has been thoroughly indexed by name, title, and periodical. Because every item has been annotated, scholars and students can, for the first time, gain an idea of the subject-matter of all Mencken's writings, especially his magazine and newspaper work. The indexes will allow users to locate any given item with ease. The chronological arrangement of each section allows users to understand the growth and development of Mencken's work, making this volume an invaluable resource.
Download or read book H L Mencken written by Vincent Fitzpatrick and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a career that spanned half of a century, Henry Louis Mencken published more than 10 million words. More than a million were written about him, many of which, Mencken liked to remark, were highly condemnatory. He was called, with good reason, the most powerful private citizen in America during the 1920s.This lively introduction to Mencken's life and work begins with a concise biographical portrait before proceeding to a consideration of the five major periods of the renowned Baltimorean's career: his literary apprenticeship; the growth of his national reputation; his fame and unprecedented popularity during the 1920s (when college students would flash the Paris-green cover of the American Mercury as a badge of sophistication); the decline of his reputation during the Depression; and his renewed popularity during the 1940s, with the publication of his autobiographical trilogy, the Days books. In discussing this varied career, Vincent Fitzpatrick touches upon all the roles that Mencken played: journalist; editor; redoubtable critic of literature, culture, and politics; philologist; and autobiographer. Drawing upon Mencken's extensive correspondence of more than 100,000 letters, the book stresses his unflagging belief in the need for free speech (up to the limits of common decency). Indeed, in the end Mencken proved a significant American civil libertarian.Iconoclast, critic, satirist, "individualist," H. L. Mencken offered unique insights into American life. His lifelong celebration of the freedom to dissent marks his most enduring contribution to a nation that gave him such a wealth of material and so much delight.
Download or read book In Defense of American Liberties written by Samuel Walker and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated comprehensive history of the American Civil Liberties Union recounts the ACLU's stormy history since its founding in 1920 to fight for free speech and explores its involvement in some of the most famous causes in American history, including the Scopes "monkey trial," the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Cold War anti-Communist witch hunts, and the civil rights movement. The new introduction covers the history of the organization and developments in civil liberties in the 1990s, including the U.S. Supreme Court's declaration of the Communications Decency Act as unconstitutional in ACLU v. Reno.
Download or read book Mencken s America written by Henry Louis Mencken and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous as a political, social and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner. This is a collection of work previously only published in newspapers and magazines.
Download or read book The Secular Revolution written by Christian Smith and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents a radical rethinking of the secularization of American public life.
