Henry Louis ""H. L."" Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Mencken, known as the ""Sage of Baltimore”, is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century. “Mencken wrote nearly 250 letters, postcards, and telegrams to Hood. In this bright little volume, Peter Dowell includes slightly more than half of those missives. . . . [His] editing of the letters is in every way admirable, as is his introduction.” – American Spectator