H. L. Mencken - Early Life

Early Life

Mencken was the son of August Mencken, Sr., a cigar factory owner of German ancestry. When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street (now the H. L. Mencken House), in the Union Square neighborhood of Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his life.

In his best-selling memoir Happy Days, he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy."

When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life". He determined to become a writer himself. He read prodigiously. In one winter while in high school he read Thackeray and "then proceeded backward to Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Johnson and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century". He read the entire canon of Shakespeare, and became an ardent fan of Kipling and Thomas Huxley. But as a boy Mencken also had practical interests, photography and chemistry in particular, and eventually had a home chemistry laboratory which he used to perform experiments of his own devising, some of them inadvertently dangerous.

After graduating (with honors) from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at the age of sixteen, he worked for three years in his father's cigar factory. He disliked this work, especially the selling part, and resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898, he took a class in writing at one of the country's first correspondence schools (the Cosmopolitan University). This was to be all of Mencken's formal education in journalism, or indeed in any other subject. On his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business reverted to his uncle, and Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism. He applied in February 1899 to the Baltimore Morning Herald newspaper, and was hired as a part-timer there, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired on as a full-time reporter, and his new career was well underway.