"The Libido for the Ugly" is an essay by H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), a Baltimore journalist, satirist, and social critic of the American scene.
"The Libido for the Ugly" was first published in 1926 as a column in the Baltimore Evening Sun and next in Mencken's book Prejudices: Sixth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927).
Mencken writes from the point of view of a passenger on an east-bound express train of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Specifically, the speaker is scanning the landscape between Pittsburgh's East Liberty station and Greensburg, declaiming an endemic ugliness in architecture and poverty and nature.
This industrial ugliness, he claims, is shameful and in contrast to the quaint charm of Europe's poor and rural villages.