The journal was established in 1925 by Kemp Malone, Louise Pound, and Arthur G. Kennedy "to present information about English in America in a form appealing to general readers", and was inspired by H. L. Mencken.
He has also performed in numerous Off Broadway productions including his own one-person play The Impossible H. L. Mencken.
A literary critic as well and he knew notable writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Manchester, and H.L. Mencken.
Accordingly, many of the chapters feature anti-war quotes beneath the chapter titles, from figures ranging from William Tecumseh Sherman to Peter Ustinov, as well as more general quotes relating to concepts such as government and the social construction of reality, from people such as Oscar Wilde and H.L. Mencken.
Chodorov published articles in a variety of magazines, including H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's.
Fiske, a 1928 graduate of Cornell University, had worked for the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s, had written for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, had corresponded with George Bernard Shaw, had written an article now considered a classic, "Bernard Shaw’s Debt to William Blake", and had translated Shakespeare's Hamlet into Modern English.
Critics of American culture, such as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, author of Babbitt, cited the Middletown studies as examples of the banality and shallowness of American life.
He began his career as a freelance writer before World War I; he was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, "The Foreigner", appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set.
Morehouse was a world traveler who drove across the United States over 23 times and visited 80 foreign countries in search of stories and interviews with such personalities as Sergeant Alvin York, Eugene O'Neill, Christopher Fry, H. L. Mencken, "Alfalfa Bill" Murray, and Shoeless Joe Jackson.