it's funny to be circling around to mencken. he was the hero of my father and my grandfather: both franklin sartwells, both hard-drinking newspapermen just down the road in dc, for whom mencken was the greatest of their very own kind. i believe they both took on a semi-ironic reactionary stance in politics in conscious homage to their sage. it mattered that mencken came from a working-class background and never went to college; he was a practical newsman with ink on his hands. 

so i have a lovely weathered three-volume mencken autobiography, published by knopf in 1940 and consisting of happy days, newspaper days, and heathen days. they are inscribed "FGSartwell, 1943" and then "and Frank Sartwell, his son, to Crispin Sartwell, his son, on his 21st birthday. June 20, 1979" (that was in the last year of my father's life). but also mencken's undoubted status as a man of letters lent respectability or dignity to the status of newsman. 

bierce and twain were beloved on all the same grounds, and i also have my dad's devil's dictionary. i never met my grandfather, but it would shock me if he didn't cultivate a nice disillusionment with regard to the entire human condition and a humorous leverage thereon, since that is the code of the sartwells!