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“Whether or not the young journalists of today live so spaciously is a question that I am not competent to answer, for my contacts with them, of late years, have been rather scanty. They undoubtedly get a great deal more money than we did in 1900, but their freedom is much less than ours was, and they somehow give me the impression, seen at a distance, of complacency rather than intrepidity. In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes. I well recall my horror when I heard, for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf: it was as if I had encountered a stud-horse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate. I was shocked almost as much when I first heard of reporters joining labor unions, and describing themselves as wage slaves. The underlying ideology here, of course, was anything but new, for I doubt that there has ever been a competent reporter in history who did not regard the proprietors of his paper as sordid rascals, all dollars and no sense. But it is one thing (a) to curl the lip over such wretches, and quite another thing (b) to bellow and beat the breast under their atrocities just as it is one thing (a^2) to sass a cruel city editor with, so to speak, the naked hands, and another thing (b^2) to confront him from behind a phalanx of government agents and labor bravoes. The a operations are easy to reconcile with the old-time journalist's concept of himself as a free spirit and darling of the gods, licensed by his high merits to ride and deride the visible universe; the b's must suggest inevitably a certain unhappy self-distrust, perhaps not without ground.”

Not just personal but professional curiosities are confounded as well: Writers come hither sniffing for tips will be bilked, for the sage neatly denies us of any useful particulars about his craft. The only specifics he offers are in one of the closing chapters, enumerating the ways he and his colleagues often fleshed out meager leads with private inventions, sometimes going as far as fabricating the entire story. Mencken's methods must, it seems, remain lost to posterity.

An important lesson, however, is continuously dangled before the reader, and it helps explain both Mencken's remarkable sedulousness and his highly refined prose: Do what you love and do it to death! While his peers toiled away as “simian sophomores” pursuing lives of quiet desperation, Mencken was chasing down his reporter's dream, going to bed every night exhausted, but never weary. I was so incensed after I finished this book that I marched right down to the office of the Cooper Point Journal, our student newspaper, and immediately put in my resume. Let's hope fate smiles on me quite as kindly!