With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter " Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now fifty years after Mencken’s death the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days Heathen Days Newspaper Days Prejudices Treatise on the Gods On Politics Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work Minority Report and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. Most of these autobiographical writings first appeared in the New Yorker. Here Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s.