The Sahara Of The Mencken Analysis

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Recommended: Literature and racism

Half Mammals of Dixie, written by George Singleton, is a collection of short stories about events that unfold in the South. Among those stories is Fossils, which is about a boy named Compton and his father’s desire to change the racist community they live in and bring down a corrupt newspaper owner degrading the black community by cutting out any news about them in the paper. Another great Southern criticism reviewed is The Sahara of the Bozart written by H.L Mencken. This takes place in 1920s and is about how the American South has lost all of its sense of culture and arts. Mencken has the desire to change his senseless community for the better and have a more cultural diverse society. He explains that there is no art, theaters, or music …show more content…

In Fossils, everyone is blind to the fact that stuff is cut out from the newspaper. The people of South Carolina or oblivious to the corruption of the newspapers and do not seem to care there is missing information. During this time race wars and segregation were still going on. The KKK was still in its prime and black privileges were at a low. Singleton writes, “Every once in a while, there would be a note from a customer saying how he or she kept getting cut-out and/or smudged papers” (Singleton 25). In The Sahara of the Bozart it is the same scenario. Everyone in the South seems to be oblivious to the fact there is no culture and that the positions of higher rank are being filled with people that are not qualified at all. None of the Southerner’s care about the theater or any culture and arts making a wasteland of thoughtless people. Mencken writes, “In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays, or a single public monument that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things” (Mencken 159). Mencken is troubled that there has been such a loss of culture in the South. No one took pride in what they did and the few that did were not given any appreciation or support from any of the other Southerners, which is why it was so hard to have any culture in the

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