He is a third cousin of Signor Enrico Nathan, the late Socialist mayor of Rome. His uncle, Dr. Émile Nathan van der Linde, _privat docent_ in anthropology at Leyden, was killed by savages in Borneo in 1889, while a member of the Oesterling exploring expedition. He has never visited the battlefield at Gettysburg. H. L. MENCKEN He was born at Baltimore on Sunday, September 12, 1880, and was baptized in the Church of England. He was educated at the Baltimore Polytechnic, and is theoretically competent to run a steam engine or a dynamo, but actually is quite incapable of doing either. Down to the age of fifteen it was his ambition to be a chemist, and to this day he is full of fantastic chemical information and fond of unloading it. At the age of fourteen he invented a means of toning photographic silver prints with platinum. The family business was tobacco, and he was drafted for it on leaving school. He became a journeyman cigar-maker, and can make excellent cigars to this day. But when chemistry and business died out, literature set in, and he took to journalism. At the age of twenty-three he was city editor and at twenty-five managing editor of the Baltimore _Herald_, now defunct—the youngest managing editor of a big city daily in the United States. He printed a book of poems at twenty-two—now a rare _bibelot_. He was “discovered,” as the saying is, by Ellery Sedgwick, now editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, but then running _Leslie’s Monthly_. He and Sedgwick have remained on friendly terms to this day, but he sometimes writes for the _Atlantic_. In 1900, having read Lafcadio Hearn’s “Two Years in the French West Indies,” he shipped on a banana boat for the Spanish Main, and has returned to the West Indies three times since. He is five feet, eight and a half inches in height, and weighs about 185 pounds. In 1915 he bulged up to 197 pounds. Then he took the Vance Thompson cure and reduced to 175, rebounding later. The things he dislikes most are Methodists, college professors, newspaper editorials (of which, in his time, he has written more than 10,000), Broadway restaurants, reformers, actors, children, magazine fiction, dining out, the New Freedom, prohibition, sex hygiene, _The Nation_, soft drinks, women under thirty, the nonconformist conscience, Socialism, good business men, the moral theory of the world, and the sort of patriotism that makes a noise. Among the men he admires are Joseph Conrad, W. R. Hearst, E. W. Howe, Richard Strauss, Anatole France, and Erich Ludendorff—this last because he is a great general and has never uttered a single word of patriotic or pietistic cant. He likes Dreiser, but does not admire him. His taste in female beauty runs to a slim hussy, not too young, with dark eyes and a relish for wit. He abhors sentimentality in women, holding that it is a masculine weakness, and unbecoming the fair. He seldom falls in love, and then only momentarily.