To a degree, the nation Mencken claims to delight in as an "Eden of clowns" is a mischievous creation unified by his own powerful sense of the ridiculous. Throughout Prejudices, he drives the diverse "bosh mongers," spewers of buncombe and "geysers of pishposh" into the same corral through sheer brawny eloquence and fistic wit.

Thus his menagerie of scoundrels brings together such strange bedfellows as "the Ku Klux Klan and all other clownish fraternal orders," Chambers of Commerce, Methodists, Chautauquans, prohibitionists, sex hygienists, Freudian "necromancers," the "snouting and preposterous Puritan," and the "fantoddish old suffragette."

Indeed, his prose style is an assertion of masculine puissance (to use one of his favorite words); and it strikes one that what gives such galvanic force to his writing is not only his "unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate," but his outraged feeling that America is being emasculated by purveyors of genteel literature, wowsers, teetotalers, and "vassarized" women. "Here," he says, "is a land in which women rule and men are slaves. Train your women to get your slippers for you, and your ill fame will match Galileo's or Darwin's."

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Mencken. One of the great linguists of America, he, a master of the colored noun and the sharp-edged verb. A national treasure, too.