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A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial by H.L. Mencken Introduction by Art Winslow Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2006, 206 pp. Reviewed by Edward Caudill University of Tennessee

Introduction by Art Winslow This volume is a selection of Mencken's articles and columns on the 1925 Scopes trial. Most are from the Baltimore Evening Sun, with one from the Nation, and one from the AmericanMercury. It is an excellent collection from the period's foremost journalist, cultural critic and wordsmith. But it is more. The Scopes trial is window on a variety of themes in Mencken's work, especially in the 1920s. The trial was the perfect stage for his anti-religious impulse, quite evident in this volume. There are several worthy examples of his penchant for South-baiting, which he made into a national sport, still to the chagrin ofthose who resent his mean-spirited but hilarious caricatures. His cynicism and elitism are inescapable in several of the pieces, such as "Battle Now Over, Mencken Sees; Genesis Triumphant and Ready for New Jousts," on the conviction of Scopes, or "Round Two," in which Mencken assails the "imbecility" of Fundamentalism and celebrates the death of William Jennings Bryan as perhaps signaling some faint hope for intellectual discussion in the South. His reference to the "Ku Klux Klergy" (in the book's first column, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial