“Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.”

A sharp-eyed American journalist and satirist of the early 20th century, Mencken’s razor wit and unflinching critique of pretension defined the Baltimore Sun’s editorial pages. His essays and columns skewered political hypocrisy, cultural affectation, and the pretensions of the American mainstream, earning him a reputation as the era’s most fearless voice of skepticism.