Book: A Book of Prefaces

Overview
Published in 1917, H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces assembles a quartet of bristling essays that double as manifestos for a tougher, more truthful American literature. Posing as prefaces to books by writers he admires, Mencken uses the form to champion artistic courage and to attack the moralistic prudery he believes has throttled the national imagination. The volume’s through line is an argument for aesthetic freedom and intellectual candor against a culture of uplift, timidity, and censorship.

On Joseph Conrad
Mencken exalts Joseph Conrad as a consummate artist of moral ambiguity and psychological depth. Against the era’s demand that fiction teach edifying lessons or parade spotless heroes, he praises Conrad’s sea tales and political novels for their scrutiny of will, fate, and the half-lit regions of conscience. Craftsmanship, rhythm, architecture, the weight of a sentence, becomes an ethical matter in Mencken’s reading; he treats Conrad’s style as a disciplined instrument for sounding the gulfs between intention and consequence. The point is not that Conrad preaches, but that he refuses to simplify, thus honoring reality more than any sermon could.

On James Huneker
Turning to James Huneker, Mencken salutes an American critic of rare cosmopolitan reach. Huneker, he argues, broke the provincial quarantine by importing European modernism, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Ibsen, and new music, into American debate. His criticism models a sensibility that is curious, skeptical, and alive to technique, an antidote to the schoolmasterly tone that treats art as a branch of civics. Mencken admires Huneker’s volcanic appetites and stylistic fizz, not as mere flash but as evidence of a temperament that takes aesthetic experience seriously in a culture that often mistrusts it.

On Theodore Dreiser
The essay on Theodore Dreiser is both defense and coronation. Mencken concedes Dreiser’s clumsiness at the level of sentence and scene, yet insists that the novels’ raw, granular truth about American hunger, lust, and failure puts him ahead of his tidier peers. He rails at the vice societies and timid publishers who harried Dreiser’s books, treating their censorship as proof of a deeper sickness: the belief that literature exists to flatter morality rather than to observe life. In Dreiser, he finds an American novelist willing to let the facts stand, even when they humiliate the national self-image.

Puritanism as a Literary Force
The culminating essay widens into cultural diagnosis. Mencken argues that a lingering Puritan ethos, born of Calvinist suspicion of pleasure and fortified by democratic moralism, has warped American letters. Its symptoms include the cult of “uplift,” a preference for sentiment over tragedy, a dread of frankness about sex and instinct, and an impulse to police books under the banner of public virtue. The result is a literature nervous about beauty and hostile to ambiguity, written under the eye of preachers, schoolmarms, and busybodies. He does not deny American energy or talent; he contends that they have been shackled by a code that rates rectitude above insight. The remedy he proposes is not obscenity for its own sake but a Europeanized seriousness: respect for form, a tragic sense, and the courage to follow experience where it leads.

Style, Strategy, and Legacy
Mencken’s manner is barbed, aphoristic, and impatient with cant, yet it is also rooted in close reading and comparative judgment. He mixes aesthetic argument with sociological sweep, naming names when necessary, praising with gusto when he finds the real thing. The book made a public event of criticism, provoking both scandal and exhilaration. It helped fix Mencken’s persona as America’s chief scourge of philistinism and licensed younger writers and critics to treat art as an autonomous realm governed by standards other than morality. Its polemics are of a moment, but its central perception, that literature withers under the tutelage of uplift, continues to shadow debates about art and public virtue.