H.L. Mencken Reads "Prejudices: First Series" — In His Own Voice
“Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”
About this work
Prejudices: First Series (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919) is the opening volume of the six-book series that made Mencken's name as America's wittiest demolition man. It collects his essays on critics and criticism, on the "New Poetry," on figures from George Bernard Shaw to Jack London to Thorstein Veblen — each one dissected with gleeful, devastating precision.
The book is best read aloud, and best of all in the voice of the man who wrote it. Mencken's sentences were built for the ear: the mock-pompous flourishes, the sudden plain insults, the rhythm of a born performer. In his own restored voice — the cigar-roughened Baltimore drawl — the malice and the music finally land together.
Who was H.L. Mencken?
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) — the "Sage of Baltimore" — was the most feared and most quoted American critic of his age: a newspaperman, essayist, and scholar of the American language whose prose hit like a thrown brick. From the pages of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, he ridiculed boobs, boosters, Prohibition, fundamentalism, and most of the literary establishment, while championing writers he believed told the truth.
Richard Wright said of reading him, "This man was fighting, fighting with words... using them as one would use a club." Mencken's two lifelong themes, by his own account, were simple: he was for liberty and he hated fraud. He wrote both with a wit so sharp it still draws blood a century later.
About the voice
This recording is reconstructed from a genuine archival recording of H.L. Mencken — chiefly the interview he gave Donald Howe Kirkley at the Library of Congress on June 30, 1948, the only substantial record of his voice in existence. It is a restoration built from that real audio, capturing his actual raspy Baltimore drawl. It is not a present-day impersonation and not a claim that Mencken is literally speaking today.
Provenance: Restored from real recordings. We label every voice honestly — restored, narrated, or disputed.
Questions
What did H.L. Mencken sound like?
Mencken had a raspy, dry Baltimore drawl, often described as sounding as if filtered through a cold cigar. The single surviving substantial recording — his 1948 Library of Congress interview, made months before a stroke ended his career — preserves exactly that voice.
Is this really his voice?
It is a restoration built from the real 1948 recording of Mencken's actual voice, so the timbre and accent are authentic to the man. It is not a live recording of him reading this book and not an impersonation — it is his documented voice, reconstructed.
Is Prejudices: First Series in the public domain?
Yes. Published in 1919, the book is in the public domain in the United States, which is why it can be freely produced as an audiobook.
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