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Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956

"A Book of Prefaces"

Frank Harris is
deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession"
by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate
thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. George
Moore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane Allen's "A
Summer in Arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence
is forbidden publication altogether; at the same time half a dozen cheap
magazines devoted to sensational sex stories attain to hundreds of
thousands of circulation. A serious book by David Graham Phillips,
published serially in a popular monthly, is raided the moment it appears
between covers; a trashy piece of nastiness by Elinor Glyn goes
unmolested. Worse, books are sold for months and even years without
protest, and then suddenly attacked; Dreiser's "The 'Genius,'"
Kreymborg's "Edna" and Forel's "The Sexual Question" are examples. Still
worse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one State is forbidden in
another as _contra bonos mores_.[74] Altogether, there is madness, and
no method in it.


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