In Baltimore, soon after the general elections of 1948, Henry Louis Mencken suffered a severe stroke that damaged his power of speech and his ability to read and write. But it left his remarkable mind unimpaired and isolated. Two years later a massive coronary occlusion brought him once more to the verge of death. In the brick row house on Rollins Street where he had spent nearly all his life, Mencken sank, fighting, into the twilight of aphasia. It was a cruel fate for a man of Mencken's measure, and in his anguish he...
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