Riding on the Edge: A Motorcycle Outlaw's Tale

Ride with author John Hall into the turbulent world of 1960s bike club culture, from the time he joined an upstart motorcycle club from Dixie, and rose to become Long Island chapter president of the Pagans, a club that the FBI called "the most violent criminal organization in America." Follow him into the Pagan heartland of Pennsylvania where he fell in love, got in a roadhouse brawl over a honky-tonk angel, and eventually went to jail for "takin' care a club business." Now after a career as a journalist and college professor, he returns to the violent days of his youth and smashes up stereotypes like he once smashed up bars, resurrecting long-dead brothers, in a style reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Mark Twain. Hall presents them as they really were: hard living, hard loving, hard drinking, hard fighting rebels, but also hardworking, patriotic, loyal, and lovable characters, and a band of brothers whose outlandish behavior forged an all-American outlaw legend in the tradition of Jesse James, Doc Holliday, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Outlaws yes, but outlaws as American as apple pie.

A former chapter president of the Long Island Pagans, John Hall has done time in the state pen, as well as Penn State, where he taught history, American studies, rhetoric, and mathematics. He also worked as bouncer, bartender, bookmaker, stonemason, professional gambler, law clerk, and freelance journalist. He has written over 400 syndicated opinion columns, which have appeared in over a dozen newspapers, including the Houston Post and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has raised seven children, half the time as a single parent. He currently lives in a 127-year-old dilapidated farmhouse in the Appalachian Mountains, where he seeks what George Jean Nathan once described as the three essentials of life: reasonable well prepared food, a moderately alcoholic diet, and the amiable company of amiable women.