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James Carlos Blake
James Carlos Blake (born May 26, 1947) is an American writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His work has received extensive critical favor and several notable awards. He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” as well as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.” He is a recipient of the University of South Florida's Distinguished Humanities Alumnus Award and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Biography Blake has written about his boyhood in a memoir essay entitled “The Outsider” and has discussed his life and work in a profile in ''Texas Monthly'' and in a wide-ranging interview in '' Firsts''. He was born in Tampico, Mexico, a third-generation Mexican descended from American, English, Irish, and Spanish ancestors—including a British pirate who was executed in Veracruz, Mexico—and is a naturalized American citizen. His father, Carlos Sebastian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Writer Of Novels
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work. Description Novelists come from a variety of backgrounds and social classes, and frequently this shapes the content of their works. Public reception of a novelist's work, the literary criticism commenting on it, and the novelists' incorporation of their own experiences into works and characters can lead to the author's personal life and identity being associated with a novel's fictional content. For this reason, the environment within which a novelist works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Wesley Hardin
John Wesley Hardin (May 26, 1853 – August 19, 1895) was an American Old West outlaw, gunfighter, and controversial folk icon. Hardin often got into trouble with the law from an early age. He killed his first man at the age of 15, claiming he did so in self-defense. Pursued by lawmen for most of his life, in 1877 at the age of 23, he was sentenced to 24 years in prison for murder. At the time of sentencing, Hardin claimed to have killed 42 men, while contemporary newspaper accounts attributed 27 deaths to him. While in prison, Hardin studied law and wrote an autobiography. He was well known for exaggerating or fabricating stories about his life and claimed credit for many killings that cannot be corroborated. Within a year of his 1894 release from prison, Hardin was killed by John Selman in an El Paso saloon. Early life Hardin was born in 1853 near Bonham, Texas, to James "Gip" Hardin, a Methodist preacher and circuit rider, and Mary Elizabeth Dixson. He was named after ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanley Ketchel
Stanisław Kiecal (September 14, 1886 – October 15, 1910), better known in the boxing world as Stanley Ketchel, was an American professional boxer who became one of the greatest World Middleweight Champions in history. He was nicknamed "The Michigan Assassin." He was murdered at a ranch in Conway, Missouri, at the age of 24. Biography He was born in 1886 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Tomasz Kiecal and Julia Kiecal (née Olbinska), whose family immigrated from the village of Sulmierzyce in Piotrków Trybunalski, Guberniya, in modern-day central Poland. He avoided school, instead falling in with a gang of street kids and often getting into fist fights. At twelve years old, he ran away from home, becoming a child hobo. As a teenager he lived in Butte, Montana, where he found employment first as a hotel bellhop and then as a bouncer. This profession obviously led to many scraps that established his reputation as the best fist fighter in town. Soon enough sixteen-year-old Stan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Dillinger
John Herbert Dillinger (June 22, 1903 – July 22, 1934) was an American gangster during the Great Depression. He led the Dillinger Gang, which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations. Dillinger was imprisoned several times and escaped twice. He was charged with but not convicted of the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana, police officer, who shot Dillinger in his bullet-proof vest during a shootout; it was the only time Dillinger was charged with homicide. Dillinger courted publicity. The media ran exaggerated accounts of his bravado and colorful personality, and cast him as a Robin Hood. In response, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), used Dillinger as a campaign platform to evolve the BOI into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, developing more sophisticated investigative techniques as weapons against organized crime.Elliott J. Gorn, ''Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One'' (2009), p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Pierpont
Harry "Pete" Pierpont (October 13, 1902 – October 17, 1934) was a Prohibition era gangster, convicted murderer and bank robber. He was a friend and mentor to John Dillinger. Described as handsome and soft-spoken, Pierpont was a bright, natural-born leader. Fiercely loyal, he had a reputation for taking care of those around him and not squealing on his friends. He disliked publicity, and was content to let others, especially Dillinger, take credit for the bold bank robberies committed after the Michigan City prison break. Pierpont was executed in the electric chair on October 17, 1934. Early life Pierpont was born in Muncie, Indiana, to Joseph Gilbert and Lena (Orcutt) Pierpont. Harry Pierpont was the middle child with an older sister Fern (b. September 21, 1900), who died of tuberculosis when he was a teenager, and a younger brother Fred (b. July 5, 1906). His father was from Kentucky, and his mother, from Jay County, Indiana, was of German ancestry. By the 1910 census, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of America, Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by U.S. state, states that had secession, seceded. The central Origins of the American Civil War, cause of the war was the dispute over whether Slavery in the United States, slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War, Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 United States presidential election, 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the west. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bloody Bill Anderson
William T. Anderson (c. 1840October 26, 1864), known by the nickname "Bloody Bill" Anderson, was a soldier who was one of the deadliest and most notorious Confederate guerrilla leaders in the American Civil War. Anderson led a band of volunteer partisan raiders who targeted Union loyalists and federal soldiers in the states of Missouri and Kansas. Raised by a family of Southerners in Kansas, Anderson began to support himself by stealing and selling horses in 1862. After a former friend and secessionist turned Union loyalist judge killed his father, Anderson killed the judge and fled to Missouri. There he robbed travelers and killed several Union soldiers. In early 1863 he joined Quantrill's Raiders, a group of Confederate guerrillas which operated along the Kansas–Missouri border. He became a skilled bushwhacker, earning the trust of the group's leaders, William Quantrill and George M. Todd. Anderson's bushwhacking marked him as a dangerous man and eventually le ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Ashley (bandit)
John Hopkin Ashley (March 19, 1888 or 1895 – November 1, 1924) was an American outlaw, bank robber, bootlegger, and occasional pirate active in southern Florida during the 1910s and 1920s. Between 1915 and 1924, the self-styled "King of the Everglades" or "Swamp Bandit" operated from various hideouts in the Florida Everglades. His gang robbed nearly $1 million from at least 40 banks while at the same time hijacking numerous shipments of illegal whiskey being smuggled into the state from the Bahamas. Indeed, Ashley's gang was so effective that rum-running on the Florida coast virtually ceased while the gang was active. His two-man raid on the West End in the Bahamas in 1924 marked the first time in over a century that American pirates had attacked a British Crown colony. Among poor Florida "crackers", he was considered a folk hero who represented a symbol of resistance to bankers, lawmen and wealthy landowners. Ashley's activities also hindered Prohibition bootlegger ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pancho Villa
Francisco "Pancho" Villa (, Orozco rebelled in March 1912, both for Madero's continuing failure to enact land reform and because he felt insufficiently rewarded for his role in bringing the new president to power. At the request of Madero's chief political ally in the state, Chihuahua Governor Abraham González, Villa returned to military service under Madero to fight the rebellion led by his former comrade Orozco. Although Orozco appealed with him to join his rebellion, Villa again gave Madero key military victories. With 400 cavalrymen, he captured Parral from the Orozquistas and then joined forces in the strategic city of Torreón with the Federal Army under the command of General Victoriano Huerta.Krauze, ''Mexico: Biography of Power'', p. 309. Huerta initially welcomed the successful Villa, and sought to bring him under his control by naming Villa an honorary brigadier general in the Federal Army, but Villa was not flattered or controlled easily. Huerta then sought to dis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blood Meridian
''Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West'' is a 1985 in literature, 1985 Epic (genre), epic novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western (genre), Western, or sometimes the Revisionist Western, anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House. In a loosely historical context the narrative follows a fictional teenager referred to as "the kid," with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the John Joel Glanton, Glanton gang, a historical group of scalping, scalp hunters who massacred Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous Americans and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a physically massive, highly educated, preternaturally skilled member of the gang who is extremely pale and completely bald from head to toe. Although the novel initially received ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., July 20, 1933) is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres. He is known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American writers. McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, although he was raised primarily in Tennessee. In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee, but dropped out to join the US Air Force. His debut novel, ''The Orchard Keeper'', was published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, McCarthy was able to travel to southern Europe, where he wrote his second novel, '' Outer Dark'' (1968). ''Suttree'' (1979), like his other early novels, received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to tr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mexican–American War
The Mexican–American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the (''United States intervention in Mexico''), was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It followed the 1845 American annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered its territory. Mexico refused to recognize the Velasco treaty, because it was signed by President Antonio López de Santa Anna while he was captured by the Texan Army during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The Republic of Texas was '' de facto'' an independent country, but most of its Anglo-American citizens wanted to be annexed by the United States. Sectional politics over slavery in the United States were preventing annexation because Texas would have been admitted as a slave state, upsetting the balance of power between Northern free states and Southern slave states. In the 1844 United States presidential election, Democrat James K. Polk was elected on a platform of exp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
