H. L. Mencken has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is The American Language.
A Mencken Chrestomathy
Summary
Edited and annotated by H. L. M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books - the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong - but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all. Listeners will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans - Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.
©1916, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1932, 1934, 1942, 1949 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
In Defense of Women
Summary
Originally published in 1922, this book considers topics that remain of vital interest to today’s readers, including monogamy and polygamy, the double standard, sexual harassment, and declining marriage rates. Written in Mencken’s characteristic no-nonsense manner, In Defense of Women crackles with controversy and caustic wit. “The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naïve and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian, or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements” (H. L. Mencken).
Public Domain (P)1999 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The American Language
Summary
American author, scholar, and satirist H.L. Mencken wrote The American Language in 1919, intending to defend American speech from prescriptivist critics. "America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making." PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Public Domain (P)2021 Rebecca H. Lee