H. L. Mencken, future famed columnist/commentator/author and linguist, survived the fire at the beginning of his blossoming journalism and literary career, but the offices of his newspaper, the "Baltimore Herald" (at the northwest corner of St. Paul and East Fayette Streets), were destroyed on the northern edge of the "Burnt District". Mencken related the fire and its aftermath near the end of the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy, "Newspaper Days: 1899–1906", published 1941, "When I came out of it at last I was a settled and indeed almost a middle-aged man, spavined by responsibility and aching in every sinew, but I went into it a boy, and it was the hot gas of youth that kept me going."