The Six Thousand

Almost nothing is known of the enigmatic Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, aside from the fact that she is a beguiling and haunting author who lives in Washington D.C. Her best-selling biography is "Mencken: An American Iconoclast," a compilation of archival interviews, love letters, and FBI files, shedding light on the public and private life of journalist H.L Mencken. Menken was amazingly prolific, a blogging phenomenon before the term was invented. "A student of the American language, he might have liked the phrase, but would have urged bloggers to stress information over attitude. His style combined relentless facts, a disdain for cliches, and uncompromising integrity. In other words, he was a nightmare for media marketing experts." We do know that Marion Elizabeth Rodgers was an undergraduate at Baltimore's Goucher College when she first became interested in the lives and writings of Mencken and his wife, Sara Haardt. After college, Rodgers lived 3 1/2 years in Baltimore while working on her humongous biography of Mencken.