W. H. A. Williams

With H. L. Mencken Revisited, historian and scholar William H. A. Williams presents a thorough and up-to-date revision of his acclaimed 1977 study of Mencken. Integrating two decades of new scholarship and addressing recently disclosed materials and allegations, Williams provides readers with a highly readable and authoritative overview of Mencken's lifework. Ably fulfilling its goal of furnishing an intellectual biography and showing how Mencken's ideas developed and changed over time, the volume chronicles Mencken's vision of the artist-iconoclast, appraises his contributions to American thought and letters, traces his transition from literary to sociocultural critic, and explores his major themes and views on pre- and postwar society. The study also incorporates new sections on Theodore Dreiser, the South, African Americans, and the question of racism, and concludes by placing Mencken within the tradition of American critics of democracy. Mencken's writing, Williams observes, shows "courage, conviction, and serious commitment to ideals." Yet "deeper still, we catch glimpses of a sad, lonely man, unable to integrate the contradictory forces he tried to contain."

The image of the Irish in the United States changed drastically over time, from that of hard-drinking, rioting Paddies to genial, patriotic working-class citizens. In 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, William H. A. Williams traces the change in this image through more than seven hundred pieces of sheet music - popular songs from the stage and for the parlor - to show how Americans' opinions of Ireland and the Irish went practically from one extreme to the other. Because sheet music was a commercial item it had to be acceptable to the broadest possible song-buying public. "Negotiations" about their image involved Irish songwriters, performers, and pressured groups, on the one hand, and non-Irish writers, publishers, and audiences, on the other. Williams ties the contents of song lyrics to the history of the Irish diaspora, suggesting how ethnic stereotypes are created and how they evolve within commercial popular culture.

"Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character draws from more than one hundred accounts by English, Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish tourists written between 1750 and 1850 to probe the moral judgments British observers made about the Irish countryside and its native inhabitants." "Whether consciously or not, these travel writers defined their own British identity in opposition to a perceived Irish strangeness: the rituals of Catholicism, the seemingly histrionic lamentations of the funeral wake, cemeteries with displays of human bones, the archaic Irish language or the Celtic-infused English that they heard spoken. Overlooking the acute despair in England's own industrial cities, they opined that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated failures of the Irish character." "By the eve of the Famine of the 1840s, travel writers were employing stereotypes of Celtic, Catholic carelessness in the south of Ireland and Saxon neatness and enterprise in predominantly Protestant Ulster, even calling for "Saxon" colonization of the west of Ireland. The Famine cleared the land of many of the peasants, but the western landscape, magnificent in its scenery but poor in its soil, eventually defeated most of the British "colonists," leaving the region to an ever-increasing number of tourists who could enjoy the picturesque mountainscapes without the distracting contradiction of an impoverished populace."--Jacket.