Editing H. L. Mencken (section)

==Early life and education==
Mencken was born in [[Baltimore]], [[Maryland]], on September 12, 1880. He was the son of Anna Margaret (Abhau) and [[August Mencken Sr.]], a [[cigar]] factory owner. He was of [[German American|German ancestry]] and spoke [[German language|German]] in his childhood.<ref>{{Citation |last=Sowell |first=Thomas |title=Migrations and Cultures: A World View |page=82 |year=1996 |place=New York City |publisher=[[Basic Books]] |isbn=978-0465045891 |quote=... it may be indicative of how long German cultural ties endured [in the United States] that the [[German language]] was spoken in childhood by such disparate twentieth-century American figures as famed writer H. L. Mencken, baseball stars [[Babe Ruth]] and [[Lou Gehrig]], and by the Nobel Prize-winning economist [[George Stigler]]. |author-link=Thomas Sowell}}</ref> When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street facing Union Square park in the [[Union Square, Baltimore|Union Square]] neighborhood of old West Baltimore. Apart from five years residing elsewhere during the marriage that left him a widower in middle age, Mencken would stay there for the rest of his life.<ref>{{Citation |title=Detailed description |url=http://www.menckenhouse.org/about/about_house.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051027092318/http://www.menckenhouse.org/about/about_house.htm |place=Baltimore |publisher=Mencken's home |archive-date=October 27, 2005 |url-status=dead}}</ref>

In his bestselling memoir ''[[Happy Days, 1880–1892|Happy Days]]'', he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy".<ref>''Happy Days'', p. vii</ref>

When he was nine years old, he read [[Mark Twain]]'s ''[[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|Huckleberry Finn]]'', which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life".<ref>St. Petersburg Times&nbsp;– September 23, 1987</ref> He became determined to become a writer and read voraciously. In one winter while in high school he read [[William Makepeace Thackeray]] and then "proceeded backward to [[Joseph Addison|Addison]], [[Richard Steele|Steele]], [[Alexander Pope|Pope]], [[Jonathan Swift|Swift]], [[Samuel Johnson|Johnson]] and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century". He read the entire canon of [[Shakespeare]] and became an ardent fan of [[Rudyard Kipling]] and [[Thomas Huxley]].{{Sfn | Goldberg | 1925 | pp = 90–93}} As a boy, Mencken also had practical interests, [[photography]] and [[chemistry]] in particular, and eventually had a home chemistry [[laboratory]] in which he performed experiments of his own design,
some of them inadvertently dangerous.<ref>''Newspaper Days, 1899–1906'', p. 58.</ref>

He began his primary education in the mid-1880s at Professor Knapp's School on the east side of Holliday Street between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the [[Holliday Street Theatre]] and across from the newly constructed [[Baltimore City Hall]]. The site today is the [[War Memorial Plaza|War Memorial and City Hall Plaza]] laid out in 1926 in memory of World War I dead. At 15, in June 1896, he graduated as valedictorian from the [[Baltimore Polytechnic Institute]], at the time a males-only mathematics, technical and science-oriented [[Public High School|public high school]].

He worked for three years in his father's cigar factory. He disliked the work, especially the sales aspect of it, and resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898 he took a writing class at the Cosmopolitan University,{{Sfn | Goldberg | 1925 | p = 93}} a free correspondence school established by [[Cosmopolitan (magazine)|The Cosmopolitan]] magazine.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Noonan |first1=Mark |title=The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine by James Landers (review) |journal=American Studies |date=2012 |volume=52 |issue=1 |pages=186–187 |doi=10.1353/ams.2012.0016}}</ref> This was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal [[post-secondary education]] in journalism, or in any other subject. Upon his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business passed to his uncle, and Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism. He applied in February 1899 to the ''Morning Herald'' newspaper (which became the ''[[Baltimore Morning Herald]]'' in 1900) and was hired part-time, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired as a full-time reporter.{{citation needed|date=August 2023}}