Dan Poynter is an author of more than 100 books, has been a publisher since 1969 and is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP). He is an evangelist for books, an ombudsman for authors, an advocate for publishers and the godfather to thousands of successfully-published books. His seminars have been featured on CNN, his books have been pictured in The Wall Street Journal and his story has been told in US News & World Report. The media come to Dan because he is the leading authority on book publishing. Dan travels more than 4,000 miles each week to share, inspire and empower people through keynotes and seminars.

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F-R-E-E Writing-Publishing-Promoting InfoKits

Born: September 12, 1880
Died:  January 29, 1956

"I edited both newspapers and magazines, some of them successes and some of them not, and got a close, confidential view of the manner in which opinion is formulated and merchanted on this earth. ... Like any other man I have had my disasters and my miseries, and like any other author I have suffered from recurrent depressions and despairs, but taking one year with another I have had a fine time of it ... and no call to envy any man. "

~  Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland.

~  Both his parents were children of German immigrants. His paternal grandfather had settled in the German section of Baltimore, making cigars. His father eventually started his own tobacco firm, providing a comfortable home for Henry and his younger two brothers and sister. 

~  Christmas 1888, Mencken received a Dorman's Baltimore No.10 Self-Inker Printing Press. While learning to set up the boy's press, he accidentally smashed the lower case "r's," forcing him to reduce his first two names to H.L.

~  At age nine, a library opened down the street from his house. There, he discovered Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. That was, as he put it, “probably the most stupendous event in my whole life.”

~  Mencken finished his studies at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute when he was fifteen. He then went to work in his father's cigar factory, but he hated it. In private, he wrote and wrote. Following his father's death in 1899, he applied for a job at the Baltimore Morning Herald.

~  Mencken soon gained a reputation as a boy wonder, learning all there was to learn about a newspaper. He advanced with alarming speed, becoming city editor and managing editor of the Herald. When the Herald folded in 1906, Mencken went to the Sunpapers as Sunday editor. 

~  The scope of Mencken's writings was broad. With cigar jammed in the side of his mouth, he satirized the American South after the Scopes Monkey trial, criticized American democracy, joked about Prohibition, challenged the place of women in society and advocated free speech. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore," he became a general critic and commentator on all facets of American society.

~  In 1914 Mencken joined up with drama critic George Jean Nathan and co-edited The Smart Set magazine. It became so popular, copies were sold in movie theaters to entertain the audience until the feature was shown.

~  With Nathan, he cofounded several pulp magazines and American Mercury, a successful and influential magazine of the 20s. During this time, he also published The American Language, a guide to American expressions and idioms.

~  Mencken became a literary adviser at Knopf Publishers. He published manuscripts by young writers Eugene O'Neill and Dorothy Parker, reviewed works of Upton Sinclair, Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

~  Mencken regularly contributed to the Chicago Tribune, New York American and the Nation. He was a columnist in Evening Mail in New York and 'The Free Lance' in Sunpapers in Baltimore.

~  In 1930, the confirmed bachelor married Sara Haardt, an English teacher at Goucher College. They moved into an apartment on Cathedral Street in Baltimore. Five years later, she died of tuberculosis. Mencken moved back to his beloved three-story, red brick row house at 1524 Hollins Street.

~  A prolific writer, he also collected quotations. In 1942 he published A New Dictionary of Quotations. It is organized by subject, instead of author, allowing the reader to find all familiar sayings by topic. Mencken didn't include his sayings in the book, but several attributed to "Writer unidentified" suspiciously sound like Mencken.

~  On November 28, 1948, Mencken picked up a manuscript from his secretary's apartment, and suffered a stroke. While he regained his physical capabilities, he lost the ability to read and had difficulty speaking. 

~  Two months later, Mencken died in his sleep. His ashes were buried near his parents and his wife at Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore.

~  Mencken wrote--according to some estimations--3,000 newspaper columns. During the 15-year period following World War I, he set the standard for satire in his day, and his essays are still widely read.

Read Mencken's writings. 

Make sure then, before your character reads that article verbatim, your fictional journalist is familiar with it too.  

CLEANED UP
Stan shot back to the hotel room, ready to howl. "We're free as birds!"

"What'd you hear?" Frannie asked, snuffing out a butt. "And don't you try to lie to me, Stanley R. Watson, just to make me feel better."

"It's in the paper, sweetie." He plopped on the edge of the bed, folding the newspaper around the article. "Right here, first line, clear as day: 'An overheated electrical outlet is believed to be the cause of the October fire of Millie Wentworth's ranch house on Phillips Avenue.'"

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