The American Critic - Magazine - The Atlantic: That these writers now rest in the pantheon, and that Americans who fancy themselves intellectuals reflexively oppose what they take to be the established order, is largely owing to Mencken, whom Walter Lippmann described in 1926 as “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.” In fact he was more than that—he is the most influential critic in American history, really the only influential critic in American history. He exerted that influence thanks not to his ideas but almost entirely to his beguiling style, at once rollicking and astringent. Mencken was the first serious writer to be saturated, as Edmund Wilson noted in a 1921 essay, with “modern commercial America,” a culture that captivated and appalled him. And so his prose, as Wilson said, married an almost 18th-century lucidity and force to “the slang of the common man … and compelled it to dance a ballet.”