Prejudices: First Series

Overview
"Prejudices: First Series" gathers H. L. Mencken’s early mature essays into a compact arsenal of iconoclasm. Written during the immediate postwar years and published in 1919, the volume presents a sustained assault on American moralism, provincial culture, and the democratic worship of mediocrity. Rather than a linear argument, it is a suite of self-contained pieces unified by a temperament: skeptical, free-thinking, and allergic to cant. Mencken steps forward as a distinctly American critic who subjects national myths to a European-influenced standard of taste, intelligence, and intellectual bravery.

Contents and Themes
The essays range widely across literature, politics, religion, education, and journalism. Mencken treats American letters as a field hobbled by Puritan suspicion of pleasure and intellect, arguing that the prevailing culture values uplift and piety over artistry. He dissects the foibles of critics who confuse moral hygiene with aesthetic judgment, and he mocks the earnest custodians of culture who believe art should instruct the masses. Against this climate he champions the independent artist and critic, urging an aristocracy of the mind in a land devoted to leveling.

His political pieces sharpen the same blade. Democracy, for Mencken, easily devolves into a market in soothing illusions, with politicians trading in flattery while voters demand comfort over truth. The press becomes a conduit of platitude, preferring sensationalism and moral sermon to clarity and skepticism. On religion he sees the lingering grip of Puritanism, an ethic of suspicion toward joy, spreading into public policy, education, and the courts, culminating in prohibitions and pruderies that shrink the scope of individual liberty.

Style and Voice
Mencken writes in a style that fuses barbed wit with hard-edged analysis: aphoristic, hyperbolic by design, and studded with classical and Continental references. The prose is athletic and urbane, moving from satirical portraits to densely reasoned pages without losing momentum. He favors the epigram that stings and the analogy that exposes a hidden absurdity, all in service of clearing away what he sees as the debris of moralistic thinking. Even when he exaggerates, the exaggeration functions as a diagnostic instrument, isolating the nerve of an argument so that its pain or vacuity can be felt.

Context and Aims
Appearing at a moment of wartime hangover and reformist zeal, the book targets the optimism of progressivism and the coercions of uplift. Mencken’s battles are less with particular public figures than with habits of mind: the reflex to turn every question into a moral catechism, the deference to majority tastes as a criterion of truth, the suspicion of the solitary imagination. He positions criticism as a form of intellectual hygiene, an antidote to the sentimentality that clouds civic and artistic life. He also gestures to alternative models for American culture, pointing toward European skepticism and toward homegrown writers who accept art’s autonomy from social utility.

Significance
"Prejudices: First Series" established Mencken as a dominant critical voice of the 1920s, sharpening debates about the purpose of criticism and the health of American culture. Its provocations endure because they frame questions that recur: how to secure space for art in a moralizing society, how to think freely in a democracy that prizes conformity, how to separate taste from virtue. The book’s real subject is the defense of intellectual independence, staged with a relish that makes the attack on piety feel like an affirmation of life.