The Passing of a Profit & Other Forgotten Stories

Edited by Douglas Olson
San Francisco: Forgotten Stories Press, 2012
216 pages

hardcover: $25.00

paperback: $17.00

Before H. L. Mencken became “Mencken” he tried his hand at writing short stories for a wide variety of popular magazines. But ultimately he decided that fiction was not his forte and instead focused his energy on the essays and criticism that made him famous.

Mencken’s short stories have been virtually forgotten: omitted from bibliographies, overlooked by scholars, and available only to intrepid readers who hunted down copies of the original magazines. Thus Douglas Olson’s collection of 17 forgotten stories written between 1900 and 1906 will be welcomed by Mencken aficionados.

Sparkling with Mencken’s trademark wit and irony, most of these stories are about “ugly Americans” pushed to their limits in dealings with “others”: women, Europeans, Latin Americans, and Blacks. Several stories draw upon Mencken’s travels in Jamaica. Although most of these stories are light farces with abrupt endings, “The Last Cavalry Charge” (1906) is a terrifying prophecy of the mechanized slaughters that were soon to define the twentieth century.

Nobody who loves H. L. Mencken’s voice will be immune to the charms of these stories. It is not often that a new book appears by a writer who has been dead for more than 50 years, but this volume will be new to virtually everyone. The Passing of a Profit is obligatory reading not merely for Mencken scholars but also for his legions of avid admirers.

CONTENTS

Editor’s Foreword by Douglas Olson

1. The Defeat of Alfonso
2. The Cook’s Victory
3. The Woman and the Girl
4. The Crime of McSwane
5. Like a Thief in the Night
6. The Flight of the Victor
7. The Point of the Story
8. A Double Rebellion
9. Hurra Lal, Peacemaker
10. Firing and a Watering
11. The Passing of a Profit
12. The Heathen Rage
13. The Fear of the Savage
14. The Bend in the Tube
15. The Star-Spangled Banner
16. The King and Tommy Cripps
17. The Last Cavalry Charge

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Louis Mencken, 1880–1956, the “Sage of Baltimore,” was one of the most influential American journalists and critics of the first half of the 20th century, renowned for his keen intellect, independent judgment, and acerbic wit. Mencken’s books include The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907), In Defense of Women (1918), The American Language (1919), Prejudices (1919–1927), Treatise on the Gods (1930), Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934), and his memoirs Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940), Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941), and Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943).

hardcover: $25.00

paperback: $17.00