Highly Irregular - Hardcover

Southern Illinois University Press

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809306840 ISBN 13: 9780809306848

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974

Synopsis

Although he is the leading biographer of Mencken and now writes for the paper Mencken himself once wrote for, Carl Bode is his own man before a typewriter and, as this collection shows, a singularly acute observer of popular culture.

 

In his preface to this first collection of his popular newspaper columns written for the Washington Post and the Balti­more Evening Sun, Carl Bode says about the columns that in their background is ?a mixed bag of facts: that I teach American literature at the University of Mary­land in College Park; that I divide much of my off-campus time between Washing­ton and Baltimore; that both as a writer and a teacher I’m attracted by two dizzy­ingly different literary rebels, Henry David Thoreau and H. L. Mencken; that I am delighted by my students and bemused by their ways; and that I’m fasci­nated by the popular culture of our times as it shifts and sashays around.”

 

Readers who relish the human comedy in its American mode will especially en­joy this collection of pieces by an emi­nent student of our civilization who wears his learning lightly.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Bode is the editor of a widely used Thoreau anthology and of Thoreau’s col­lected poems. He is also the founder and first president of the American Studies Association, a past president of the Tho­reau Society of America, a former cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Great Brit­ain, and author or editor of a half-dozen books on popular culture as well as the author of the distinguished biography, Mencken.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1974
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809306840
• ISBN 13: 9780809306848
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277