Jan 4, 2006
Exactly how many words did the Sage of Baltimore write?
Today's New York Times reports that H.L. Mencken was "among the most prolific" American writers and social critics.
"In a career of almost 50 years, Mencken wrote more than 70 million words—many intended to expose hypocrisy, debunk received wisdom and take on all manner of sacred cows," writes Thomas Vinciguerra.
But not even Mencken could have produced that many words! Composing copy at that rate would have required him to pound out more than 1.4 million words a year—or about 3,835 words a day. That's the equivalent of a midsize New Yorker feature on a daily basis, and would have left little time to eat, drink, bathe, shave, sleep, edit, get laid, and play music, all of which Mencken was known to do.
So if 70 million words exaggerates Mencken's output, how many words did he write? Nexis and Google searches collect a range of estimates, none of which approaches 70 million.
The nearest figure to 70 million is attributed to Mencken scholar Vincent Fitzpatrick, by Brennen Jensen in the Jan. 26, 2000, Baltimore City Paper. The piece posits a conservative estimate of Mencken's printed output at about 15 million words.
Mencken biographer Fred Hobson supports a 10 million-plus figure in 1994's Mencken: A Life. Hobson writes, "In his collection at the Pratt [library] he placed schoolboy grades, commencement accounts, bank statements, records of earnings, medical histories (including an exhaustive hay fever diary), and much else. All this is, of course, in addition to the more than ten million words in print, including journalism, which in 1940 he estimated he had produced and the more than one hundred thousand letters he wrote in his lifetime."
Writing in the Feb. 2, 1990, Jerusalem Post, Peter Schertz attributes this circa 1940 quotation to Mencken: "I have probably written 10,000,000 words of English and continue to this day to pour out more and more." ...
"In a career of almost 50 years, Mencken wrote more than 70 million words—many intended to expose hypocrisy, debunk received wisdom and take on all manner of sacred cows," writes Thomas Vinciguerra.
But not even Mencken could have produced that many words! Composing copy at that rate would have required him to pound out more than 1.4 million words a year—or about 3,835 words a day. That's the equivalent of a midsize New Yorker feature on a daily basis, and would have left little time to eat, drink, bathe, shave, sleep, edit, get laid, and play music, all of which Mencken was known to do.
So if 70 million words exaggerates Mencken's output, how many words did he write? Nexis and Google searches collect a range of estimates, none of which approaches 70 million.
The nearest figure to 70 million is attributed to Mencken scholar Vincent Fitzpatrick, by Brennen Jensen in the Jan. 26, 2000, Baltimore City Paper. The piece posits a conservative estimate of Mencken's printed output at about 15 million words.
Mencken biographer Fred Hobson supports a 10 million-plus figure in 1994's Mencken: A Life. Hobson writes, "In his collection at the Pratt [library] he placed schoolboy grades, commencement accounts, bank statements, records of earnings, medical histories (including an exhaustive hay fever diary), and much else. All this is, of course, in addition to the more than ten million words in print, including journalism, which in 1940 he estimated he had produced and the more than one hundred thousand letters he wrote in his lifetime."
Writing in the Feb. 2, 1990, Jerusalem Post, Peter Schertz attributes this circa 1940 quotation to Mencken: "I have probably written 10,000,000 words of English and continue to this day to pour out more and more." ...