The first American to be widely read as a critic was H. L. Mencken. Though, earlier, James Russell Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe had been better endowed than Mencken with critical intelligence, their proficiency in other literary forms had obscured to some degree their skills as critics.

Mencken was born in Baltimore, Md., on Sept. 12, 1880, and privately educated there. After graduating from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at the age of 16, he became a reporter on the Baltimore Herald. He rose rapidly; soon he was the Herald's city editor and then editor.

In 1906 Mencken joined the organization known as the Sunpapers, which he served in a variety of ways until his retirement. His outstanding piece of journalism, widely syndicated, concerned the Scopes trial of 1925 in Tennessee, in which a high school science instructor was prosecuted for teaching evolution, contrary to a state law. The Smart Set and the American Mercury, both of which Mencken shared in editing (1908-1923; 1924-1933) with George Jean Nathan, were additional vehicles for his opinions.

Mencken's journalistic skills became his chief handicap as a critic, for he sacrificed discrimination for immediate attention, esthetic and philosophical distinctions for the reductions of easy reading, and subtleties of statement for buffoonery and bombast. Yet, though one may deplore his methods, they gained a wide audience and opened the way for the development of criticism. In this sense, he was the progenitor of modern American criticism, though he himself has no disciples.

Despite what was just short of pandering to popular taste by one who derided popular taste, Mencken derived certain critical principles from his study of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and French critic Remy de Gourmont. Nietzsche's contempt for the leveling tendencies of democracy and Christianity influenced Mencken's heavily ironic Notes on Democracy (1926), A Treatise on the Gods (1930), and A Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)