HL. Mencken's ferociously satirical attack on the South was launched on a small scale when an attenuated version of "The Sahara of the Bozart" appeared in the New York Evening Mail on Nov. 13, 1917. But it was not until 1920 that "Sahara" made its first major penetration of the region when it appeared as a more comprehensive vituperative essay in the second of Mencken's appropriately entitled series, Prejudices. Although Mencken found almost nothing worth sparing in the cultural desert of the South, either by way of its small "c" anthropological culture or its capital "C" Culture of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, his denunciations bypassed the whole field of journalism and the popular press, except for an occasional reference to, or quotation from, a newspaper story that reinforced a condemnatory point about the desiccation of Southern social structures and the sorry state of the arts and learning in the South. Since he indicated that after James Branch Cabell had been counted one could not find a single Southern prose writer who could actually write, perhaps the practice of journalism and its news products in the South were simply beneath even Mencken's profound contempt: had Mencken not been the kind of journalist he was—an intellectual imperialist who took the entire realm of symbolic expression and moral and political action as his territory—one might have attributed his failure to lambaste Southern journalism to an oversight caused by the relatively modest standing of journalism among the civilizing arts. But modesty did not impose many constraints on Mencken in any of his filibustering expeditions, so it is difficult to conceive of his underrating his chosen profession in this way.