I've been meaning to read William Manchester's H.L. Mencken: Disturber of the Peace (1950) for some time, so I brought it along to read on the plane. I'll have to think about how far I agree with the quotes from Mencken at the start of the book, but they're worth remembering:

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by ... dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe-- that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. ( Prejudices, Fourth Series

Any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail-- the principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into human motives and acts-- is received with the utmost hostility. To attempt such an interprise is to disturb the peace-- and the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over into the downright criminal. (A Book of Prefaces

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