With his mother's help, he was a reader by the time he was four,[3] and during his boyhood read works such as Plutarch's Lives, Josephus, Revolutions in Europe and Charles Rollin's Ancient History.

[1] He spent the summers on his father's farm and the winters in school until he was nineteen years old, and, after teaching for a few months, in 1848 entered Farmer's College, near Cincinnati, where he graduated in 1851.

He afterward established a Sunday newspaper in Cincinnati, and from 1852 to 1853 worked on the Columbian and Great West, a weekly.

[4] The following year, he acquired a pecuniary interest in the paper, which began rapidly to increase in circulation and influence.

Mencken as "the classic reporter of our conventions," illustrating Halstead's penchant for fun invective with, among other things, his raucous description of Stephen Douglas:An exposed political empyric; a dishonest truckler for unsound popularity; a false pretender to notions of honor, and a foul-mouthed bully self convicted of cowardice, though a coat of whitewash a foot in thickness would not cause him to pass for a gentleman, it cannot be denied that he will make a most admirable candidate.

[8]In 1890, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he edited the Standard Union,[6] though he continued to write for the Commercial Gazette.