Sara Haardt couldn’t wait to leave the south—but she also couldn’t stop writing about it.
Born in Montgomery on March 1, 1898, Sara Powell Haardt was descended from Bavarian immigrants and grew up near the state capitol building. The oldest of five siblings, she was born a “blue baby,” nearly dying at birth from a lack of oxygen. She had poor health for the rest of her life, but this never deterred her ambition and writing.
Haardt attended the Margaret Booth School in Montgomery, a college preparatory school, and its graduates frequently pursued higher education at northeastern colleges such as Goucher, Vassar, and Wellesley. After graduation, Haardt left Alabama at the age of eighteen and never again resided in the state for a lengthy period of time. However, she returned via her writing, which describes the deep south with acute observations, ambivalence, and wit.
Haardt entered Goucher college in Baltimore, Maryland, surviving the 1918 influenza pandemic, but her health never fully recovered. She graduated in 1920 and was soon hired by their English department. When her early efforts at writing for magazines wrought nothing but rejections, she took a job as college postmaster.
She briefly taught in Montgomery, then returned to her beloved Baltimore and Goucher College, and took graduate psychology courses at Johns Hopkins. Haardt met H. L. Mencken at one of his lectures at Goucher in May of 1923, during a period of improved health, and when her stories about the south were being regularly published in The Reviewer.
Mencken was an iconoclastic journalist and critic from Maryland who made a name for himself covering the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trail in Dayton, Tennessee. Gene Kelly’s acerbic character in the classic film Inherit the Wind is loosely based on Mencken and his withering commentary on the trial and southerners.
Despite his subsequent low opinion of the south, Mencken described Haardt as possessing “a full measure of that indefinable pleasant thoughtfulness which passes commonly under the banal name of Southern charm.” However, shortly after her romance with Mencken began, Haardt was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Even when confined to a hospital room or a sanitarium porch (a popular method for treating tubercular patients was exposing them to as much fresh air as possible), Haardt continued to write, describing her experience at the Maple Hill sanitarium in her short story “Licked.” For the next two years, in and out of the hospital, Mencken continued to woo Haardt. In one telegram, presumably after a discharge from the hospital, he wrote: “It is excellent news you are well enough to escape. I suggest we meet at the old ruined mill…I’ll be present in advance, along with my jug.” (Don’t forget, it was still Prohibition…)
When Haardt recovered from tuberculosis she broke up with Mencken, possibly due to fear that the disease would return. She declared the end of their courtship “a closed chapter in my book.” California had a long history of being regarded as having the ideal climate for tuberculosis sufferers, and Haardt moved to Los Angeles. She worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and wrote multiple screenplays, selling one, but ultimately none of her scripts were produced for film.
Despite earning more money than ever before, Haardt returned to Baltimore (to Mencken’s great delight). She began working on a manuscript and he lugged firewood to her apartment nightly, holding her hand in front of the fire. In October 1928 Haardt entered the hospital for emergency appendicitis surgery, but the worst had happened—tubercular lesions were found in her left kidney. The doctors predicted that she might live three years at the most, and the caustic Mencken wept.
In a 1927 letter, Mencken wrote that one of the “inventions” he was vainest of was coining the still-used phrase “Bible belt,” and also stated his views on marriage: “If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women.”
On August 27, 1930, Haardt and Mencken married at St. Stephen the Martyr Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Mencken had found his “superior” woman, and Haardt married a man who was not only devoted to her and the preservation of her health, but also determined to further her writing career.
The Making of a Lady, Haardt’s only novel, was published in 1931 and received praise for its descriptions of the industrialized south. Hundreds of miles away from Alabama and “the sweet, flowering South, the clinging tyranical South” she increasingly found success in writing about the region she had left behind.
After years of rejections, her work was now regularly published in prestigious magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and the Atlantic Monthly. Her short story “Absolutely Perfect” was selected for the O. Henry Prize stories for 1933, and she was included again in the 1935 prize collection. She was invited to join Eleanor Roosevelt’s Committee of the Institute of Women’s Professional Relations, and a reviewer praised Haardt’s “complete understanding of the psychology of girls and women.”
Haardt and Mencken wrote daily in separate rooms, and loved hosting parties for friends and literary luminaries in the evening. When she was strong enough, they traveled to Sea Island, Georgia, the Caribbean, and visited the Holy Land: Italy, Algeria, and Egypt by cruise. The predicted three years stretched to four, and even when confined to bed she continued to write. Later photographs of Haardt show her still stylish, but her gentle eyes and face are wan from battling long illness. In September of 1934 she was able to travel to Montgomery to visit her family, but by December she was too sick to return for her mother’s funeral.
After a long struggle with tuberculosis, Haardt passed away on May 31, 1935, at the young age of thirty-seven. Mencken never remarried, and they are buried together in his family’s plot in Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery.
The library at Goucher College, Haardt’s alma mater, holds the collection of her writings and personal letters that Mencken donated after her death.
Photo Credit: Sara Haardt on her wedding day. [Photo provided by Goucher College Library]
Additional Information
- In 1999, a selection of Haardt’s short stories, essays, and unpublished writings were compiled in Southern Souvenirs, edited by Ann Henley. The collection was published by the University of Alabama Press and is available for purchase if you are interested in exploring Haardt’s writing. https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817309763/southern-souvenirs/
- Also available from the UA Press is The Constant Circle: H. L. Mencken and His Friends by Montgomery native Sara Mayfield, a journalist and longtime friend of both Haardt and Mencken. https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817350635/the-constant-circle/
Sources
- Encyclopedia of Alabama entry: https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/sara-haardt/
- Ann Henley’s article about Haardt for Menckeniana: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26484881?seq=1
- Photo from the Alabama Department of Archives and History: https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/media/sara-haardt/
- There is an article about Haardt in issue 31: https://www.alabamaheritage.com/issue-31-winter-1994.html
- Mencken’s “Bible belt” quote: https://web.archive.org/web/20150708154841/http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/h-l-mencken-letter-to-charles-green-shaw-9819
- Telegram from Mencken to Haardt: https://collections.digitalmaryland.org/digital/collection/gome/id/4/
- California and Tuberculosis: https://www.medicalheritage.org/2017/03/24/guest-post-tuberculosis-in-california-a-statistical-analysis-from-1880-1910/
- Margaret Booth school in Montgomery:
- http://www.awhf.org/booth.html
- Goucher College Haardt and Mencken exhibition: https://blogs.goucher.edu/intheloop/6715/a-charmed-love-the-baltimore-of-sara-haardt-and-h-l-mencken-1923-1935/
About the author
Katharine Armbrester graduated from UAB in 2019 with an MA in history and received an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She loves the world of periodicals, Alabama history and writing.
