A Woman Overshadowed

During her thirty-seven years (1898-1935), Sara Haardt-Mencken produced scores of written material, including a novel, a movie script, over fifty short stories, and countless articles, essays, and book reviews. Despite her success, though, she is often an afterthought in the wake of her husband, Henry L. Mencken, one of the most notorious Baltimore writers of the time. 

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A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Haardt was the eldest of five children. Her childhood was, in many ways, picturesque. Her family enjoyed a well-off life, and though their German origin placed them somewhat low on the overall social hierarchy of the South, the Haardts were still one of the more prominent families in the area. Haardt spent her adolescent years dancing, learning, and reveling in the South. 

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Alabama – and the South itself – would come to haunt her. She loved it as much as she disdained it. Much of the culture of the ‘Old South,’ the South that held the Civil War in high esteem, the South that struggled and fought to rebuild themselves after the ruin the Civil War left, the South that romanticized Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, was strong in the early 1900s. The love of the beaten Confederacy was palpable in the air, and Confederate flags were often shown during parades. Haardt had a particular fascination with Varina Davis, the First Lady of the Confederate States, and would often read and review books about the woman. Though Haardt would move to Baltimore and end up traveling the world, the South stayed with her, and many of her works explore her contradictory feelings towards her home.

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Haardt went to the Margaret Booth School, an institution in Montgomery dedicated to a rigorous college preparatory curriculum for young Alabama women. In June of 1916, Margaret Booth herself wrote a letter to the then Dean of Goucher, Miss Eleanor Lord, detailing Haardt’s life and accomplishments. Booth wrote that “[Haardt is] one of the most gifted girls I have ever taught.”​

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Haardt, though, wasn’t satisfied with the colleges and universities most of her classmates went to, such as Sewanee in Tennessee. She wanted a school where she could expand her mind, where she could grow without the societal constraints that so many southern women were forced to adhere to. Haardt learned about Goucher College in a magazine and the moment she saw the ‘city’ college she was hooked. Determined to establish personal and professional independence outside of the South, she decided to go to Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. These years would come to define her in many ways.

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Haardt was, without a doubt, a hard worker. Throughout her life, she struggled with tuberculosis and would eventually die at age thirty-seven because of meningitis. Her sickness was often overwhelming. Despite her love of teaching, she only taught one year before being urged by Lilian Welsh, a well-known teacher at Goucher College, to discontinue any strenuous work. Welsh wrote to Haardt in June of 1924 saying that she was “entirely responsible for advising against [Haardt's] return to college next year.” 

Despite numerous upswings and downswings with her health, Haardt would continue to write even when she could barely get out of bed. In 1927 she spent months in Hollywood, California trying to get a short story of hers published. She would go on to be nominated for the O. Henry Prize in 1933 for her short story “Absolutely Perfect.” One of her stories, “Widow Woman,” would go on to be printed in two Scandinavian papers in 1937.

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By the time she died, Sara Haardt-Mencken was, without a doubt, on the road to becoming one of the most influential Southern writers of her time. In a copy of Goucher College's Alumni Quarterly, 1936, it was written that, "In her died an authentic voice of the South; not of the Old South, which she loved but condemned, not of the New South, whose vulgarity she deplored, but of the South which the more gifted of its sons and daughters see sometimes, briefly, with the eyes of the spirit."​