This Rare and Hard To Find Book is in GREAT condition with the original owners name to the ffep. This will make a great addition to your collection !!

Heliogabalus A Buffoonery in Three Acts Written on a lark by Mencken, with only a little assistance from his friend and Smart Set co-editor Nathan. They wanted to prove to themselves how easy it was to write a successful play. The result bears an uncanny resemblance to Mel Brooks' hit, The Producers. Of it Mencken wrote in 1937: "... the hero should be a man universally disreputable, and ... there should be nothing in the play savetime-honored theatrical buncombe. Every sort of novelty in the plot was to be barred, and the so-called psychology was to be as transparent as possible" (quoted in Betty Adler's The Mencken Bibliography). Despite their deliberate artlessness, they received numerous offers to stage the play, turning down a $10,000 bonus and later the entreaties of John Barrymore's agent.

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Mencken, known as the "Sage of Baltimore", is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century.

Mencken is known for writing The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and for his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he named the "Monkey" trial.

George Jean Nathan (February 14 1882 – April 8 1958) was an Americandramacritic and editor.

Noted for the erudition and cynicism of his reviews, Nathan was an early champion of Eugene O'Neill. Together with H.L. Mencken, he co-edited the magazine The Smart Set from 1914 and co-founded The American Mercury in 1924. He was also a founder and an editor (1932–35) of the American Spectator, and after 1943 he wrote a syndicated column for the New York Journal-American.

Over the years, Nathan's criticisms were published in Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Critic and the Drama (1922), The Testament of a Critic (1931), Since Ibsen (1933), Passing Judgments (1935), The World of George Jean Nathan (1952), and The Magic Mirror (1960). Nathan's philosophy of criticism is laid out in Autobiography of an Attitude (1925).