华东理工大学 高级英语 授课教案 Book 2 unit 7.pptVIP

Advanced English Lesson 7 The Libido for the Ugly H.L. Mencken About the author Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was the first American to be widely read as a critic. Though, earlier, James Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe had been better endowed with critical intelligence, their proficiency in other literary forms had obscured to some degree their skills as critics. About the author Mencken was born in Baltimore, Md., on Sept. 12, 1880, and privately educated there. After graduation from Baltimore Polytechnic institute at the age of 16, he became a reporter on the Baltimore Herald. He rose rapidly; soon he was the Herald’s city editor and then editor. About the author In 1906 Mencken joined the organization known as the Sun papers, which he served in a variety of ways until his retirement. His outstanding piece of journalism, widely syndicated, concerned the Scopes trial of 1925 in Tennessee, in which a high school instructor was prosecuted for teaching evolution, contrary to the law. The Smart Set and the American Mercury, both of which Mencken shared in editing, were additional vehicles for his opinions. About the author Mencken’s journalistic skills became his chief handicap as a critic, for he sacrificed discrimination for immediate attention, esthetic and philosophical distinctions for the reductions of easy reading, and subtleties of statement for buffoonery and bombast. Yet, though one may deplore his methods, they gained a wide audience and opened the way for the development of criticism, though he himself has no disciples. About the author Mencken’s appreciation of the juicy phrase interested him in its informal aspects. Behind this interest was a distrust of Englishmen--a philo-Teutonism– that deluded him into holding that American speech was the unique product of a new environment. By the time of his death on Jan. 29,1956, in his beloved Baltimore, recognition of his service to the language was everywhe