"Hobson applies the term "racial conversion narrative" to several autobiographies or works of highly personal social commentary by Lillian Smith, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, James McBride Dabbs, Sarah Patton Boyle, Will Campbell, Larry L. King, Willie Morris, Pat Watters, and other southerners, books written between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s in which the authors - all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society - confess...

Ever in control, H.L. Mencken contrived that future generations would see his life as he desired them to. He even wrote Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and other books to fit the pictures he wanted: first, the carefree Baltimore boy; then, the delighted, exuberant critic of American life. But he told only part of the truth. Over the past twenty-five years - since the last Mencken biography - vital collections of the writer's papers have become available,...

In January 1991 the Enoch Pratt Free Library opened the sealed manuscript of H.L. Mencken's "Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work." Written in 1941-42 and bequeathed to the library under time-lock upon Mencken's death in 1956, it is among the very last of his papers opened to the public. Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work, a one-volume abridgement of Mencken's much longer memoir, vividly pictures the excitement of newspaper life in the heyday of print...