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The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, the one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition. --Alistair Cooke Fiercely intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny, H.L. Mencken's coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial so galvanized the nation that it eventually inspired a Broadway play and the classic Hollywood movie Inherit the Wind. Mencken's no-nonsense sensibility is still exciting: his perceptive rendering of the courtroom drama; his piercing portrayals of key figures Scopes, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan; his ferocious take on the fundamentalist culture surrounding it all--including a raucous midnight trip into the woods to witness a secret holy roller service. Shockingly, these reports have never been gathered together into a book of their own--until now. A Religious Orgy In Tennessee includes all of Mencken's reports for T he Baltimore Sun, The Nation, and The American Mercury. It even includes his coverage of Bryan's death just days after the trial--an obituary so withering Mencken was forced by his editors to rewrite it, angering him and leading him to rewrite it yet again in a third version even less forgiving than the first. All three versions are included, as is a complete transcript of the trial's most legendary exchange: Darrow's blistering cross-examination of Bryan. With the rise of intelligent design, H.L. Mencken's work has never seemed more unnervingly timely--or timeless.

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9781299564152

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