AFTERWORD BY ANTHONY LEWIS

INTRODUCTION AND ANNOTATIONS BY MARION ELIZABETH RODGERS

wars for “freedom.” Fanatical fundamentalists. Intrusive laws. H. L. Mencken wrote Notes on Democracy over 80 years ago. His era, the years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial, is strikingly like our own. Notes isn't just a provocative and funny blast from the past, but also a perceptive and unsentimental report on contemporary life.

Dissident Books reintroduces this gem of cynicism and clear thinking to readers with NOTES ON DEMOCRACY: A NEW EDITION. Long out of print, it’s a classic that tears apart a cherished and blindly worshiped institution with heretical glee. With Ginsu-sharp insight, Mencken performs a brilliant, hilarious, and timely vivisection of the body politic. Much of NOTES reads as though it was written today. It’s both a both timely and timeless masterpiece. See Choice Democracy Cuts for a sample of Mencken’s spleen.

The new edition includes an introduction and extensive annotations by noted Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis.

NOTES serves as the perfect anecdote to hackneyed, self-congratulatory, and mindless paeans to democracy. NOTES ON DEMOCRACY: A NEW EDITION: Don't even think about voting until you read this book!

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About the Authors

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was America’s greatest journalist and iconoclast. With his bristling, cynical humor and unmatched erudition, he mercilessly attacked war hysteria, puritanism, and censorship. As a critic, he championed uniquely American writing, helping to free the nation’s literature of its Anglophilia. Mencken covered many of the great stories of the twentieth century’s first half, including the Scopes “Monkey” trial, Prohibition, and the New Deal. Joseph Conrad said his words emitted a “crackle of blue sparks.”

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, winner of the ForeWord 2005 Book of the Year Gold Award for Biography, one of Booklist’s "Top Ten Biographies for 2005–2006," named to Chicago Tribune's Best of 2005 Nonfiction List, and a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. Her previous books are Mencken & Sara: A Life in Letters and The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories.

Anthony Lewis is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times columnist (1969-2001). He is currently the James Madison Chair of First Amendment Issues at Columbia University. His most recent book is Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.