Mencken Hasn’t Been Forgotten : Books: The noted Baltimore-born journalist will be the subject of three biographies coming out in the next few years.

Terry Teachout knows that as a biographer of H.L. Mencken, he is supposed to know everything possible about his subject. But after getting ahold of Mencken’s medical records recently and discovering what surgical procedures had been performed on him, he suspected he might have crossed the threshold.

“I was in that stage in which everything about him was interesting,” Teachout says with a laugh. “But that should be passing now.”

For almost a year now, Teachout has been immersing himself in the life of H.L. Mencken, the noted Baltimore-born essayist, journalist and critic. An editorial writer for the New York Daily News, Teachout, 36, is on part-time leave from the paper and has taken an apartment in Baltimore so that he can conduct research for his biography.

Monday through Wednesday, he can be found in the Mencken Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, a vast repository of books, newspaper clippings and magazine articles by and about Mencken (the library is his literary executor). And when he walks into the Mencken Room, there is a good chance he will see Fred Hobson or Marion Elizabeth Rodgers there as well, working on their own biographies of Baltimore’s favorite son.

One man, three biographies. Mencken would have loved it.

For in the end, the notoriously unsentimental (publicly, at least) Mencken was like most of us: He wanted to be remembered.

He didn’t particularly want to be liked; if anything, Mencken courted the displeasure of those who displeased him. With all the invective and hyperbole he could muster--classic Mencken terms included “fraud” and “shaman”--he took savage and often gleeful aim at Prohibitionists, blue noses, the narrow-minded, and an impressive roster of politicians that included William Jennings Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt.

But Mencken was obsessed with the prospect of being forgotten, his prodigious output of books, magazine pieces and newspaper articles sliding into the nether reaches of our collective memories. A confirmed atheist, he did not believe in an afterlife. But he was determined to have a literary afterlife of sorts.

“If there is ever any raid on American libraries by radicals my papers will be among the first destroyed,” Mencken wrote in his diary about two batches of memoirs that he ordered unsealed after his death. “I have sought to get ‘round this possibility by sending duplicates to different libraries, but it may not work.”

This was typical Mencken overreaction: His stature may slip now and then from the glory days of the 1920s, but most people would agree that his reputation is secure. And with three biographies coming out in the next few years, the American public will be hearing much more about him.

Hobson, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina who has written extensively on Mencken, expects to finish his biography by the end of September. His publisher, Random House, is scheduled to release the book sometime next year.

In 1994, Poseidon Press is scheduled publish Teachout’s biography. In 1995 or 1996, Oxford University Press is to release a third biography, by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, who edited two earlier books on Mencken.

That is a lot of writing on any subject, but then Mencken (1880-1956) is not just any subject. If anything, he is a biographer’s delight: intriguing both professionally and in his private life.

“It’s always in my mind that this is an unusually good person to write about,” Teachout concedes.

That has been the opinion of a number of biographers. Most have been favorable--”people appreciate the great quality of honesty, and Mencken called it as he saw it,” Hobson says by way of explanation. A notable exception was the 1956 biography “H.L. Mencken: A Portrait From Memory.” Written by Charles Angoff, a former colleague of Mencken’s at the American Mercury magazine, it was a generally sour book, though it did raise questions about Mencken’s anti-Semitism that were resurrected 30 years later.

So why another biography or three of Mencken?

“Oh, I think there’s a lot of room for more biographies,” says Douglas C. Stenerson, a retired professor of English and American Studies at Roosevelt University and early Mencken scholar. “He was such a controversial figure and had so many controversial interests, that it’s very difficult to comprehend all his activities. So there is plenty of room for new interpretations. I don’t think there’s a definitive biography yet by any means, and there’s also a lot of new material.”

Certainly, the material is there. Mencken was the most influential journalist of his day, as well as one of the most distinctive writers of his time. He was astonishing prolific, writing more than two-score books, thousands of newspaper articles (mostly for the Baltimore Sun and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and hundreds of magazine pieces, as well as an estimated 100,000 letters. In addition, he wrote two multivolume memoirs that he instructed were to be released after his death; their length alone would be a respectable output for a writer.

But he was more: “He was, without question, since Poe, our greatest practicing literary journalist,” wrote the great literary critic Edmund Wilson. Early on, as an editor of the American Mercury and Smart Set magazines, Mencken championed such writers as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, and helped get published several black writers in the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s.

He was also a forerunner to the celebrity journalists of the 1990s. When he went to Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 to cover the Scopes trial, his presence was only slightly less noteworthy than the famous lawyers handling the case--William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. His prose, filled with bombast and hyperbole, won both great admiration and bitter denunciation and was widely imitated. A collection of his newspaper writings that was edited by Rodgers and published last year carried the apt title, “The Impossible H.L. Mencken.”

“One of the things about Mencken is that he lived so long,” says Rodgers, who lives in Bethesda, Md., and has also taken an apartment in Baltimore while doing research on the biography. “He was born in 1880, when Geronimo was at his height, and he died after we had television and radio. He saw the conventions that nominated Teddy Roosevelt and also Harry Truman. His life encompasses a huge chunk of American history.”

His latest biographers came to Mencken in different ways, from different directions. But in the end, they remain fascinated by the person Hobson calls “the finest prose stylist of this century.”

For Hobson, the attraction began in the late 1960s, when he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina. “That was partly because I’m a Southerner,” says Hobson, 49. “I fancied myself a Southern iconoclast, and Mencken was the great critic of the South. He was the great truth teller, in certain ways.”