Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth 1958–

PERSONAL: Born 1958, in Santiago, Chile; married Jules Witcover (a columnist). Education: Graduate of Goucher College.

ADDRESSES: Home—Washington, DC. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Book of the Year Gold Award for Biography, Foreword magazine, for Mencken: The American Iconoclast.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(Editor) Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters; The Private Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor) The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1991.

Mencken: The American Iconoclast, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has devoted much of her work to H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), one of the best-known American journalists of the first half of the twentieth century. As a newspaper columnist, he commented acerbically on American puritanism and other topics; as a magazine editor, he published promising authors who would become famous, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes. He was also a man with prejudices he fought as his life progressed, and was a devoted husband during his brief marriage.

Rodgers's books deal with all aspects of Mencken. His private life is the focus of an epistolary collection she edited, Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters; The Private Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt. Mencken met the much younger Haardt, an aspiring writer, in 1923; this book collects letters covering their entire relationship, which ended with her death in 1935, five years after they married. Several reviewers found the volume useful for a look at Mencken's gentler side. National Review contributor John C. Chalberg noted that Rodgers had "thoroughly annotated" the missives and provided an insightful introduction.

The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories is "a fat and sassy anthology" of Mencken's columns for Baltimore newspapers and other journalistic works, according to National Review critic Terry Teachout. He deemed the collection valuable even though some pieces were available elsewhere, and others were not, in his opinion, among Mencken's most distinguished. A Publishers Weekly reviewer thought the book "carefully edited," adding that Rodgers's "useful introduction puts Mencken's career in perspective."

The public and the private Mencken come together in the biography Mencken: The American Iconoclast. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Rodgers covers his career as columnist, reporter, editor, and book author, portraying him as a prolific, brilliant man who had some serious flaws, such his bias against African Americans and Jews. Eventually, he tried to atone for his bigotry, seeking to bring black writers (including Hughes) to a wider audience and to call attention to the sufferings of Jews under Hitler. Several reviewers characterized the biography as comprehensive. Rodgers "does an excellent job of tying the strands together," remarked Joel W. Tscherne in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly commentator called the book "meticulous," while to a Kirkus Reviews critic, it was "superb" and "the best Mencken biography to date."

Rodgers told CA: "My introduction to H.L. Mencken came by accident. In 1981, two weeks before my graduation from Goucher College, as I was researching the papers of alumna Sara Haardt, I literally tripped over a box of love letters between her and H.L. Mencken. Taped to the top of the collection was a stern command, written by Mencken, that it was not to be opened until that very year. To say that my life changed course at that moment would be an understatement. Suddenly, a door was swung open into Mencke's life through the tender route of romantic correspondence. During two decades, Mencken has pulled me through many happy adventures, both personal and professional. My editing two books of his work helped me appreciate Mencken's uncompromising prose and his relentless courage in his battles on behalf of individual freedom. This became the underlying theme of Mencken.

"Immediately after the publication of Mencken and Sara, while still in my twenties, I worked as a researcher for the prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris and his wife, author Sylvia Jukes Morris. The experience showed me how to organize and extract the essential from a multitude of primary sources and to form a narrative illuminating a subject's character. The tactile connection I get by handling one of Mencken's original letters—tracing his spidery signature or seeing the blot of beer foam that has smeared the ink—is the same feeling I get when I visit his house or walk along Charles Street in Baltimore. I want my readers to feel that they are there—smelling the brewing beer on Hol-lins Street, hearing the sound of Mencken pounding on his piano. Most of all, I want readers to sense the excitement Mencken inspired among his contemporaries, when he first burst on the American scene."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1987, Mark Harriss, review of Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters; The Private Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2005, review of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, p. 1068.

Library Journal, October 15, 2005, Joel W. Tscherne, review of Mencken, p. 64.

National Review, October 9, 1987, John C. Chalberg, review of Mencken and Sara, p. 67; February 3, 1992, Terry Teachout, review of The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, p. 45.

New Yorker, February 24, 1992, John Updike, review of The Impossible H.L. Mencken, p. 98.

Publishers Weekly, September 27, 1991, review of The Impossible H.L. Mencken, p. 53; June 20, 2005, review of Mencken, p. 65.

Washington Post Book Review, February 5, 2006, Thomas Frank, review of Mencken, p. 2.