1) One of america's most famous satirists and social critics, H. L. Mencken (1880?1956) spent most of his life as a Reporter and Columnist for the Baltimore Sun. 2) He also co-founded and edited the American Mercury, an important Literary Journal. 3) Many of Mencken's essays that criticized Middle-Class values were collected into a 6-volume work entitled Prejudices, which Mencken published from nineteen nineteen through nineteen twenty-seven. 4) One of Mencken's most important works is the American Language, a study of philology, which went through four editions. 5) Mencken's Autobiography is in 3 volumes: Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943).

1) Pablo Picasso once said that when he was four years old he could paint as well as any of the great french masters, but it took him a lifetime to learn "to paint like a child." 2) The process of learning to paint like a child was a lifelong endeavour. 3) Picasso, whose Father was a drawing instructor, was born in spain in eighteen eighty one, seemingly with a pencil and paintbrush in his hand. 4) At the age of nineteen, he moved to Paris where he joined other poverty-stricken painters who were trying to establish themselves as world- famous artists. 5) While best remembered as an inventor of cubism, Picasso initially built his fame on his "Blue Period" paintings, works completed between 1901 and 1904, in which the themes of sickness, hunger, and solitude have a profound presence. 6) The Paintings of this time are almost monochrome in their use of blue paint, which has been attributed both to the poverty and sorrow visible in his spectrelike figures and to the poverty of the artist, who could afford only laundry bluing as a pigment in his otherwise inexpensive white paint.

1) Teaching clear and specific lessons, fables are short tales in which the characters are animals. 2) According to legend, Aesop was for many years a slave on the greek island of samos. 3) He was eventually freed, and he spent the rest of his life travelling before his execution in the city of delphi for insulting the oracle. 4) However, since the renaissance, scholars have doubted the actual existence of Aesop, for it seems that what is accepted as his biography has more in common with characters from greek tragedy than with any historical person. 5) In short, the name aesop was a convenient way to account for the authorship of traditional stories and pieces of folk wisdom, many of which were probably passed down in oral form centuries before Aesop's time. 6) A book entitled Aesop's Fables was first collected in the second or third century AD, and since that time these often-told stories have remained classic works of literature.

1) One of the most common, and certainly one of the most practical pieces of jewellery, the wristwatch appeared in the early part of the twentieth century. 2) Watches themselves date all the way back to fifteenth-century europe; a spring mechanism was first used as a source of power. 3) Prior to that time, clocks depended upon complicated systems of weights to measure time. 4) The Mainspring allowed clockmakers to produce portable clocks, and eventually, as technology advanced, small watches that could be worn as articles of jewellery. 5) The first watches, 6-inch high contraptions, were made of iron and were worn around the neck or waist. 6) Unlike contemporary versions, the first watches had one-handed faces, so they were inaccurate. 7) In the sixteen hundreds, pocket watches first appeared. 8) They would serve as the primary method of telling time for the next 2 centuries, and only by the start of the twentieth century would wristwatches begin to replace the classic pocket watch as the standard of time.

1) Claude Monet (1840?1926), one of the world's foremost Landscape painters, lived most of his life in le havre, france, where he painted a number of works that would define a school of modern painting known as impressionism. 2) The impressionists, including Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, focused on landscapes, attempting to capture shifts in light and colour as morning progressed toward evening or as one Season melted into another. 3) At first, these artistic Revolutionaries were disparaged by the artistic establishment, for they seemed to break most of the rules of traditional nineteenth-century painting. 4) Thus, in eighteen seventy-four, Monet and other impressionists held their own Exhibition. 5) It was then that the term "impressionism" was coined. 6) Some people believe that it was first used to denigrate the work of Monet and other members of the school because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished, as if it were the product of a first "impression." 7) Another, more plausible theory is that the movement takes its name from one of the paintings Monet exhibited?Impression: Sunrise (1872). 8) Today, the works of Monet and of members of his school hang in galleries around the world from the louvre museum in paris to the museum of modern art in new york city and the art institute of chicago.