From Baltimore to Bohemia: The Letters of H. L. Mencken and George Sterling

Some of Mencken’s most interesting letters were written to George Sterling, a pupil of Ambrose Bierce. The correspondence-which survives nearly intact on both sides-covers a wealth of subjects, including Mencken’s editorship of the Smart Set (1914-23) and American Mercury (1924-26), mutual colleagues (Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis), and most entertainingly, each author’s flagrant flouting of Prohibition as well as Sterling’s carnal adventures with a variety of women in California. These letters shed a vivid light on the literary, political, social, and cultural temper of the Jazz Age.