importance which is not strictly literary; it was "a national
institution" ¹ transcending the limitations and prejudices of
its editorial staff. One sweeping comment, by James Playsted
Wood, was that the Mercury "permanently affected Ameri-
can fiction and American literary criticism. It changed the
attitude toward the conventions and affected the tastes of
an entire generation." Mr. Wood concludes: " The American
Mercury was one of the loudest voices whose noise combined
to make the Roaring Twenties roar." ² Arthur M. Schlesinger
gives a fair example of how sober historians view the
periodical as a cultural phenomenon. Writing of the twen-
ties, Schlesinger observes that magazines, when compared
with the radio or the movies, "wielded slight influence. . . .
The principal exception was the American Mercury. . . . To
the delight of sophisticates, Mencken alike bludgeoned re-
formers, professors, 'Bible-belt Fundamentalists' and 'boo-
boisie.'" ³ Frederick Lewis Allen, in his history of the
twenties, gives a more elaborate statement of the mission of
the Mercury during its heyday:

The green cover of the Mercury and its format were as sedate
as the marble-trimmed façade of Mencken's house in Baltimore,
but its contents were explosive. . . . The magazine lustily cham-
pioned writers such as Dreiser, Cabell, Sherwood Anderson, Wil-
la Cather, and Sinclair Lewis, who defied the polite traditions
represented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; it
poured critical acid upon sentimentality and evasion and academ-
ic pomposity in books and in life; it lambasted Babbitts,
Rotarians, Methodists, and reformers, ridiculed both the religion
of Coolidge Prosperity and what Mencken called the 'bilge of
idealism,' and looked upon the American scene in general with
raucous and profane laughter. ⁴
Although Allen's description must be modified in several

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