He was a literary machine, self-designed and chiefly for killing. Shortly after the century turned, H. L. Mencken says he was “full of lust to function, and before I was twenty-five it was already plain that my functioning would take the form of a sharp and more or less truculent dissent from the mores of my country.” His literary autobiography, published now for the first time, amounts to about 40 percent of an enormous manuscript Mencken dictated between 1942 and 1948, when he suffered a stroke. It covers the years before 1924 and The American Mercury, the period when he was editing The Smart Set with George Jean Nathan and having a personal success with A Book of Prefaces and The American Language. Perhaps most memorably, it is the record of a killer’s progress, a body count conducted with Whistlerian relish (“In March, 1909, I made another violent enemy”), even as it insists its author “was far more eager to discover and proclaim merit.”

All the susceptibilities of booboisie and intelligentsia are once more on display here.

All the susceptibilities of booboisie and intelligentsia are once more on display here. A reader watches, nostalgically, as Mencken shoots them down again, like carnival ducks. He refights Mencken’s wars against “comstockery” and the “Anglomaniacs,” laps up his contempt for anyone caught mucking about in “the swamps of the uplift,” and appreciates his still-amusing contempt for the literary seacoast of Bohemia: “Ulyssesseemed to be deliberately mystifying