Helen Lincoln's delightful mother said to hell with Wareham early in the last century and fled to Provincetown, where she started a popular bookstore and became a Commercial Street fixture. By and by, she would also edit the work of an acknowledged giant of the English language, Henry Mencken.

Mencken's output was prodigious by any standard, long before he spent his last decade in stroke stricken silence. If you haven't read him before, check out Happy Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1880-1892. It's genuinely fun stuff.

In "On Being American", H.L. Mencken wrote:

"Here the business of getting a living...is easier than in any other Christian land--so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails in it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read 50 good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy."
[...]
"The United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men--that distinction is easy here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgement, of ordinary competence is so low.
[...]
Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it, all of the national standards."