Monday, November 1, 2010

Was the PKD slam called for?

The American Critic - Magazine - The Atlantic:

image detail via The Atlantic

Better late than never. Only after including works by such eminences as Charles Brockden Brown, James Weldon Johnson, and Philip K. Dick has the Library of America come round to canonizing Henry Mencken. Now his complete Prejudices series is jacketed in those spiffy glossy-black covers and printed on that tissuey for-the-ages stock. Uneven and overstuffed, the Prejudices books—six collections of Mencken’s cultural, social, and literary criticism focusing on the American scene, published between 1919 and 1927—aren’t Mencken’s finest work: LOA really should follow up with his The American Language, which remains one of the most profound and entertaining studies of this country’s culture ever written, and his winsome memoirs Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
I like to read Mencken, don't me wrong, but I'm not certain he's that far ahead of PKD in the pantheon of American writers.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...