Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Rodgers is a Finalist for The 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography! The lists of finalists was announced on Friday and the awards will be presented at a ceremony on April 28. We think there is a strong chance that Mencken will be the Crash of this awards ceremony.
“A solid and well-researched work, built on dozens of interviews in addition to heroic feats of archival digging. Mencken emerges here as a very different figure from the one we thought we knew from his cranky “Prejudices” books or the sarcastic items he wrote for the American Mercury in its golden age. Rodgers’s Mencken is a decent fellow: lovable and almost always in the right. The author’s thoroughgoing identification with her subject allows her to create a vivid portrait, but it also makes it difficult for her to show us how shattering Mencken’s commentary could be in the early 1920s — how alien and perverse it seemed to the “100 percent Americans” of those days — and how monotonous, unfunny and irrelevant it became in the ’30s…Let us hope that this comprehensive study of Mencken’s life introduces a new generation of readers to this enemy of falsehood and destroyer of pretense, this man whose response to the absurdity of the culture wars was laughter.”
– Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in a review for The Washington Post
A side note: Marion Rodgers plans to stay on for the LATimes Book Fest following the awards ceremony. She will speak at a panel on ‘Literary Lives’ on Sunday, April 30.
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