Highly Irregular

Although he is the leading biographer of Mencken and now writes for the paper Mencken himself once wrote for, Carl Bode is his own man before a typewriter and, as this collection shows, a singularly acute observer of popular culture.

In his preface to this first collection of his popular newspaper columns written for the Washington Post and the Balti­more Evening Sun, Carl Bode says about the columns that in their background is "a mixed bag of facts: that I teach American literature at the University of Mary­land in College Park; that I divide much of my off-campus time between Washing­ton and Baltimore; that both as a writer and a teacher I'm attracted by two dizzy­ingly different literary rebels, Henry David Thoreau and H. L. Mencken; that I am delighted by my students and bemused by their ways; and that I'm fasci­nated by the popular culture of our times as it shifts and sashays around."

Readers who relish the human comedy in its American mode will especially en­joy this collection of pieces by an emi­nent student of our civilization who wears his learning lightly.