A Book of Prefaces is H. L. Mencken's 1917 collection of essays criticizing American culture, authors, and movements.
In fact, the book was considered vitriolic enough that Mencken's close friend Alfred Knopf was concerned about publishing it because of the massive increase in patriotism during World War I in America.
The first three were concerned with specific writers: Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad and James Gibbons Huneker, respectively.
According to Sherman: "[Mencken] leaps from the saddle with sabre flashing, stables his horse in the church, shoots the priest, hangs three professors, exiles the Academy, burns the library and the university, and amid smoking ashes, erects a new school of criticism on modern German principles."
According to Mencken, Sherman's review was "a masterly exposure of what is going on in the Puritan mind, and particularly of its maniacal fear of the German."