Owen Hatteras

Major Owen Hatteras (1912–1923) is a composite personage and pseudonym created and employed by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan for The Smart Set literary magazine and adapted by Willard Huntington Wright during his short tenure as editor. The pseudonym was used to critique American (“Puritan”) traditions and ideals, such as marriage, religion, and academe, while protecting Mencken and Nathan’s own reputations. First with the “Pertinent & Impertinent” column and eventually the “Americana” column, Hatteras observed and denigrated American institutions, frivolity and sentimentalism, materialism, racism, censorship, and conservatism.

History

Owen Hatteras debuted in April 1912 and appeared regularly until Mencken and Nathan’s resignation in 1923, and in April 1919, he was presented as “Major” Owen Hatteras, denoting his decorated service in World War I. During his service, he was still able to write twelve pieces for The Smart Set during the war years, despite Mencken’s claim that “Hatteras was too proud to write,” mocking President Woodrow Wilson’s statement that “there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”[1]

The creation of Owen Hatteras was meant to be an experimental prelude to Mencken and Nathan’s desired weekly, The Blue Review. In The Blue Review, they intended to lambast traditional American morals and ideologies, mostly using satire, but the magazine never came to fruition. The Smart Set’s publisher, John Adams Thayer, was excited by the idea, but suggested that they first try out the critical tone on their current audience. Thus, they created the “Pertinent and Impertinent” column in April 1912 pseudonymously, though their own signed writings revealed much of the same sentiment. Owen Hatteras, however, could be freely raffish and acerbic. He attacked religion, marriage, morals, manners, capitalism—staples of American life. These American tropes came to be identified by Mencken as “Puritanism,” stripped of the Calvinist implications and loaded with the dated and passé mores instilled by the early American Puritans. Though Hatteras preceded Willard Huntington Wright’s editorship, Wright used Hatteras as one supply of the “truth” Wright promised his readers: real characters and people who complicated America’s idea of morality and virtue.

When Mencken and Nathan needed to defend themselves against accusations of being communist supporters, contrarily “accused...of being both agents of the Kaiser and the Bolsheviks,”[2] they wrote a satirical biography in 1917, Pistols for Two, and signed it under Owen Hatteras’s name. He was thus memorialized in the Library of Congress by cataloguers, who derived his birth year, 1862, from his article earlier in 1917, “Conclusions of a Man of Sixty.”[3] His name was attached to the “Americana” series in May 1923, which reprinted headlines and insipid articles from small towns. Hatteras mocked with false respect the small towns’ editorial efforts, denigrating their inherent racism, pro-War sentiments, Fundamentalism, Prohibition, etc. The “Americana” series continued with Mencken and Nathan in American Mercury, but they dropped Owen Hatteras because he was too playful for their new serious tone.

Though he never became the household name that Mencken and Nathan hoped he would become, Owen Hatteras had a fan following, and he responded regularly to fan mail and invitations to events (that he respectfully had to decline). In the December 1923 issue of Mencken and Nathan’s new magazine endeavor, American Mercury, they announced that Owen Hatteras had died, and in response, other magazines and newspapers wrote obituaries of him.[4]

Publications

Listed here are the works attributed to Mencken, though the name Owen Hatteras was sometimes attached to a regular contributor’s second or third piece in an issue.[5] Owen Hatteras was revealed as a pseudonym when Mencken later revised and republished certain Hatteras articles under his own name. (All of these articles are available on the Modernist Journals Project)[6]

References

  1. ↑ Harrison, S. L., ed. a.k.a. H. L. Mencken: Selected Pseudonymous Writings. Miami: Wolf Den Books, 2005. Print. p. 162
  2. ↑ Curtiss, Thomas Quinn. The Smart Set: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. New York: Applause, 1998. Print. p. 134
  3. ↑ Dolmetsch, Carl R. The Smart Set: A History and Anthology. New York: Dial P, 1966. Print. p. 36
  4. ↑ Adler, Betty. H.L.M., the Mencken Bibliography. Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Lib., 1971. Print.
  5. ↑ Dolmetsch, p. 36
  6. ↑ Harrison, pp. 161-75


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 4/23/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.