[6]From 1924 through 1933, Mencken provided what he promised: elegantly irreverent observations of America, aimed at what he called "Americans realistically", those of sophisticated skepticism of enough that was popular and much that threatened to be.

Simeon Strunsky in The New York Times observed that, "The dead hand of the yokelry on the instinct for beauty cannot be so heavy if the handsome green and black cover of The American Mercury exists.

Du Bois, John Fante, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Halper, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Sinclair Lewis, Meridel LeSueur, Edgar Lee Masters, Victor Folke Nelson, Albert Jay Nock, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Sandburg, William Saroyan, and George Schuyler.

Nathan provided theater criticism, and Mencken wrote the "Editorial Notes" and "The Library", the last being book reviews and social critique, placed at the back of each volume.

The magazine published other writers, from newspapermen and academics to convicts and taxi drivers, but its primary emphasis soon became non-fiction and usually satirical essays.

In 1945, as editor, Lawrence Spivak created a radio program called American Mercury Presents "Meet the Press".

Ryan was the financial angel for Ulius Amoss, a former Office of Strategic Services agent who specialized in operating spy networks behind the Iron Curtain to destabilize Communist governments and the publisher of International Services of Information in Baltimore; his son Clendenin Jr. was a sponsor of William F. Buckley Jr. and the Young Americans for Freedom.

William Bradford Huie[Note 1]—whose work had appeared in the magazine before—had gleaned the beginning of a new, post-World War II American conservative intellectual movement.

He also introduced more mass-appeal writing, by figures such as Reverend Billy Graham and Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover.

Buckley would succeed at what Huie was unable to realize: a periodical that brought together the nascent but differing strands of this new conservative movement.

In August 1952, he sold it to an occasional financial contributor, Russell Maguire, owner of the Auto-Ordnance Corporation (original producers of the Thompson submachine gun).

He was replaced by John A. Clements, a former reporter for the New York Journal and Daily Mirror, then director of public relations for the Hearst Corporation.

Maguire sold the Mercury to the Defenders of the Christian Faith, Inc. (DCF), owned by Reverend Gerald Burton Winrod and located in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961.

The LSF cut a deal in June 1966 with the (original) Washington Observer, finally merging with Western Destiny, a Liberty Lobby publication owned by Willis Carto and Roger Pearson, a major recipient of Pioneer Fund grants in history.

], and the spring 1980 issue celebrated Mencken's centennial, and lamented the passage of his era, "before the virus of social, racial, and sexual equality" grew in "fertile soil in the minds of most Americans".