Do You Remember?

Edited by Jack Sanders

Maryland Historical Society, 1996 - 189 pages

In 1918, while H. L. Mencken was editing The Smart Set in New York and working on The American Language in his native Baltimore, his best friend, Philip Goodman, a New York advertiser, bon vivant, and publisher, wrote a letter "reminiscing" about their German-American neighborhood of the 1880s and 1890s. He invented characters and events and wrote with irony and affection for those better times. Mencken rose instantly to the challenge and wrote a letter in similar vein. Sanders has reconstructed and annotated the correspondents’ three year efforts to out-do each other in telling tall stories.