Up from Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil - Softcover

Asbury, Herbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560255706 ISBN 13: 9781560255703

Publisher: Basic Books, 2003

Synopsis

In 1926, while a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, Herbert Asbury, great-great-nephew of Francis Asbury, the first American Bishop of the Methodist Church, submitted a chapter of his profane work-in-progress, an almost spiteful memoir of his boyhood in the Ozark town of Farmington, Missouri, to H.L Mencken's American Mercury magazine. Mencken published "Hatrack," the story of the town's prostitute, in the April issue. The Mercury was then banned in Boston at the incitement of J. Frank Chase, the head of the New England Watch and Ward Society, who called the story "bad, vile, raw stuff." Mencken was arrested selling the magazine to Chase on Boston Common in a stunt designed to provoke the free-speech trials that followed. In its restrained, but unrelenting attack on religious bigotry, irrationality, and hypocrisy, the book that was published soon thereafter retains its transgressive power today. Its taunting title, playing on Booker T. Washington's early-century bestseller Up from Slavery, gives an idea of what Asbury thought he had escaped. In his mocking humor and plain-spun language, used to evoke a bygone South suffocating in its fear of pleasure and damnation, Asbury reveals his debt to another son of Missouri, Mark Twain.

About this title

About the Author

HERBERT ASBURY (1891-1963) is the author of The Gangs of New York and its sequel, When New York Was Really Wicked, The Gangs of Chicago, The French Quarter, The Barbary Coast, and Sucker's Progress, all available from Thunder's Mouth Press.

Review

"Bracing to read and far more courageous in its attack on American religion than any book today would easily be allowed to be."

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560255706
• ISBN 13: 9781560255703
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224