This modest rowhouse on Hollins Street held one man for seventy-three years, from 1883 until his death in 1956. Henry Louis Mencken was born in 1880 and lived in this house on Hollins Street from 1883 until his death in 1956 — seventy-three years in the same rowhouse, a stability of place that gave him the detached authority to observe American life with merciless clarity. Mencken began his career at the Baltimore Morning Herald at age eighteen and spent the next decades at the Baltimore Sun, writing a column that reached readers across the country and made him the most quoted man in America.
He was a fierce critic of democracy, organized religion, the South — which he famously called the Sahara of the Bozart — Prohibition, political hypocrisy, and what he called the booboisie, his term for the middle-class conformists he saw as the enemies of genuine culture and thought. His coverage of the 1925 Scopes Trial, in which a Tennessee teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution, was savage and brilliant. He also compiled The American Language, a landmark scholarly study of how English had evolved in the United States.
Mencken was complicated — his private diaries revealed antisemitic and racist views that have damaged his reputation — but his prose style, his wit, and his willingness to puncture pretension at any level made him the model for American satirical journalism. The house is preserved as a museum to his life and work.