American journalist, essayist, editor and critic.

Born in 1880, the son of a cigar factory owner of German extraction, Henry Louis Mencken lived his whole life in Baltimore, Maryland. Instead of attending college, Mencken became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899, and then moved to the Baltimore Sun in 1906, where he continued to contribute until he stopped writing following a stroke in 1948. He was literary critic for the magazine The Smart Set, and from 1924 to 1933 he was editor of the American Mercury.

Mencken wrote editorials and opinion pieces, literary criticism, short stories, a novel, but is best remembered for The American Language, a study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and for his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial.

Individualistic, contentious, even pugnacious, Mencken was outspoken in his contempt for many aspects of American society. As a nationally syndicated columnist and book editor, he had a strong influence on the literate and articulate young writers of the 1910s and early 1920s.

Mencken married Sara Haardt in 1930; they had no children. He died in 1956.