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Celebrating the Memory, Career and Bequest of Henry Louis Mencken

MENCKEN DAY CELEBRATION 2011

Featuring a new exhibition and a lecture by Pulitzer Prize winner 
and Washington Post book columnist Michael Dirda

BALTIMORE – On Saturday, September 10, the Enoch Pratt Free Library honors the life and career of celebrated author and journalist H.L. Mencken.

The daylong celebration includes the following events:

The Mencken Room in the Central Library’s Annex will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

- Mencken and Victor Gordon: A Philological Correspondence

- Making Music: Mencken and Albert Hildebrandt

- The Free Lance, 1911-1915: A Centennial Celebration

• Mencken Society Annual Meeting, 10:15am, Wheeler Auditorium
  "H. L. Mencken, 'Foreign' Literature, and the Invention of Free Speech in Modern America," presented by Peter Mallios, associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mallios is the author of Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity.
• The 2011 Mencken Memorial Lecture, 2:30pm, Wheeler Auditorium
  "The Literary Journalist in the Era of H. L. Mencken: Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Clifton Fadiman," by Michael Dirda, book columnist for the Washington Post.

Michael Dirda received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. A graduate of Oberlin College, he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University. Dirda is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book and Classics for Pleasure. His latest book, On Conan Doyle, will be published this fall by Princeton University Press.

Henry Louis Mencken, also known as the “Sage of Baltimore,” is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century. Mencken had a long and friendly relationship with the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Mencken began to donate material to the library during his lifetime, and this continued after his death in 1956. Currently, the Pratt has the largest and the most important Mencken collection in the world, owning three-fourths of his estate.

For more information about Mencken Day and the Mencken Collection, visit our website at www.prattlibrary.org. Also look for the Pratt Library on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and YouTube.

Remember at the Enoch Pratt Free Library: “Your journey starts here.”