Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Certainly Mencken’s name came up during the course of my studies. But my real introduction to Mencken was shortly before my graduation from Goucher College, in 1981, while I was researching the papers of Southern writer and alumna Sara Haardt, whom Mencken had married, thereby shattering his reputation as “America’s Foremost Bachelor.” I was putting away one of her scrapbooks in the vault of the library when I literally tripped over a box of love letters between her and Mencken. Taped to the top of the collection was a stern command, written by Mencken, that it was not to be opened until that very year. To say that my life changed at that moment would be an understatement. Suddenly, a door was swung open into Mencken’s life through the tender route of romantic correspondence. In those days my dream was to go to graduate school and write (yet another!) dull thesis on T. S. Eliot. Instead, I focused my degree on the Mencken/Haardt collection, promptly received a book contract, and became hooked.

Rodgers has subsequently edited collections of essays by Mencken, and authored a lavishly praised Mencken biography. Joseph C. Goulden, founder of The Mencken Society, declared Rodgers’ book to be "the most superb and entertaining biography (in any field) that I’ve read in years.” Kirkus Reviews praised the book as “The best biography of Mencken to date.” The Blade found it to be “by far the best Mencken biography ever written...a masterpiece.” Publishers Weekly commended it as "a meticulous portrait of one of the most original and complicated men in American letters.”

Rodgers became interested in Mencken while researching Sara Haardt, who had attended Goucher College from whence Rodgers graduated in 1981. She discovered a trove of correspondences between Mencken and his eventual wife which she compiled and edited as the book Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt.

Rodgers was born October 31, 1958 in Santiago, Chile, the daughter of Maria Arce Fernandez and William Livingston Rodgers. She has a sister, Linda, and a brother, William. Having met him at a tribute to the Baltimore Evening Sun, she married journalist Jules Witcover on June 21, 1997 in the rear garden of his historic home in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.