> He was a fascinating combination of "the common man" and the
> anti-"common man." At times, he was proud of his superior
> sophistication to the boobs around him, but at others, he could
> out-common the most ordinary of them.
I think it is a good characterization of him. I also think he was a product of an era of the short lived urbanization in the US that started at the turn of the century. Unlike Europe, US was predominantly rural and provincial - "boobs" as HLM would say - with no visible urban class. That, however, started to change around the turn of the century, and the newly emerging urban class wanted to distinguish themselves from the yokels and boobs hitherto setting the tone of the US "Kultur." Mencken recognized that market and served it well until the Great Depression, when it collapsed.
He served that market well, I may add, because while being a product of booboisie himself, he put himself by his bootstraps on a higher, more urbane level, but not as high as the Boston patricians or NYC and European literati (his dislike of NYC and insistence on staying in provincial Baltimore is but one manifestation). He was thus a good role model for the emerging US urban class - someone who was useful in drawing a thick line separating them from the provincial yokels (the "booboisie"), but whose own standards were not too frighteningly and unattainably high. Consequently, his popularity waned quite quickly as the new urban class graduated and gained more self-confidence.
Today Mencken is either despised by lefties for his politics (ardently anti-FDR and anti-populist) and anti-semitism, and revered by libertarians for his social Darwinism, elitism, individualism, and anti-government stance. I think that the lefties miss the point altogether - Mencken political views and attitudes were quite moderate and conventional by the standards of his era (c.f. Jim Crow, KKK, rabid anti-Semitism, fundamentalism, prohibition, etc.) and his attitude toward FDR was more personal animosity than political disagreement (HLM initially supported FDR). The libertarians are somewhat closer to the mark in their assessment of HLM, but still miss the point that he was - above all - a product of the times when the US was briefly a society when the urban middle class set the tenor of popular culture - the times that were first undermined by the Great Depression populism and effectively killed by post-war suburbanization.
Wojtek