Vincent Fitzpatrick

The Curator of the H. L. Mencken Collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Fitzpatrick received his B.A. in English at the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the compiler of the second supplement to _H.L.M.: The Mencken Bibliography_ (1986), author of _H. L. Mencken_ (1989. 2004), co-author of _The Complete Sentence Workout Book_ (1991, 2003), co-editor of _Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir by H. L. Mencken_ (1994), and author of _Gerald W. Johnson: From Southern Liberal to National Conscience_ (2002). The Johnson biography received the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award (2003).

Author

Art and Politics In Yeats, Auden, and Eliot

By Vincent Fitzpatrick

Spring 1986

Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars. By Lucy McDiarmid. Cambridge.$32.50 cloth, $10.95 paper. Western civilization has never fully recovered from World War I. In November 1918, when an armistice was finally signed after f [...]

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Disturbing the Peace: Gerald W. Johnson In An Age of Conformity

By Vincent Fitzpatrick

Summer 2002 | Essays

He had been such from the beginning of his long and remarkably productive career—a career that stretched more than six decades and saw the publication of more than 15,000,000 words, including more than 40 books. Born in Riverton, North Carolina on Aug.6, 1890, he graduated from Wake Forest College in 1911 and served in France with the A.E.F. during World War I.Upon returning to America and assuming the post of associate editor on the Greensboro Daily News, he attacked the Ku Klux Klan (they threatened to visit his house at night but never showed up) and criticized the governor of North Carolina. Discussing the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee during the hot summer of 1925, he championed freedom of speech. Five years later, he denounced the Southern Agrarians and their controversial manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, and the ensuing battle lasted for decades. During the 1930's, he attacked the opponents of the New Deal and found himself at war with his employer, the Baltimore Sunpapers. As World War II approached, he lambasted the isolationists. During the 1948 presidential campaign, the Dixiecrats felt his wrath; he thought them unenlightened reactionaries. In brief, Johnson refused to keep quiet and refused to back down, and his career was marked by considerable bellicosity.

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To Be Living At This Time: An Assessment of Values

By Gerald W. Johnson, Vincent Fitzpatrick

Autumn 1992

Preface "I have not yet joined the ranks of the doomsday prophets," Gerald Johnson wrote to his sister Kate Parham during the summer of 1978. "The twentieth century has undoubtedly gone sour—not here only, but in the rest of Western civilization [...]

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After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?

By Vincent Fitzpatrick

Summer 1990

The Diary of H. L. Mencken. Edited by Charles A. Fecher. Knopf. $30.00. There is, indeed," Henry Louis Mencken wrote in his Diary in the fall of 1945, "probably no trace in history of a writer who left more careful accounts of himself and his cont [...]

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The Lady and the Tiger

By Vincent Fitzpatrick

Spring 1988

Mencken and Sara, A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt. Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. McGraw-Hill. $22.95 cloth. In May 1923, Henry Louis Mencken went to Goucher College to speak with Professor Harry [...]

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