Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes

Lauren Kessler

ISBN 10: 037550124X / ISBN 13: 9780375501241

Published by Random House (NY) May 2000, 2000

About this Item

Minor thumbing, else tight and clean. DJ shows minor rubbing. Signed on title page.

Seller Inventory # 1039437

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
• Publisher: Random House (NY) May 2000
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037550124X
• ISBN 13: 9780375501241
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Printing: First Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed By Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • 61-BIOGRAPHY

About this title

Synopsis

Pancho Barnes was a force of nature, a woman who lived a big, messy, colorful, unconventional life. She ran through three fortunes, four husbands, and countless lovers. She outflew Amelia Earhart, outsmarted Howard Hughes, outdrank the Mexican Army, and out- maneuvered the U.S. government. In The Happy Bottom Riding Club, award-winning author Lauren Kessler tells the story of a high-spirited, headstrong woman who was proud of her successes, unabashed by her failures, and the architect of her own legend.
        
Florence "Pancho" Barnes was a California heiress who inherited a love of flying from her grandfather, a pioneer balloonist in the Civil War. Faced with a future of domesticity and upper-crust pretensions, she ran away from her responsibilities as wife and mother to create her own life. She cruised South America. She trekked through Mexico astride a burro. She hitchhiked halfway across the United States. Then, in the late 1920s, she took to the skies, one of a handful of female pilots.
        
She was a barnstormer, a racer, a cross-country flier, and a Hollywood stunt pilot. She was, for a time, "the fastest woman on earth," flying the fastest civilian airplane in the world. She was an intimate of movie stars, a script doctor for the great director Erich von Stroheim, and, later in life, a drinking buddy of the supersonic jet jockey Chuck Yeager. She ran a wild and wildly successful desert watering hole known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the raucous bar and grill depicted in The Right Stuff.
        
In The Happy Bottom Riding Club, Lauren Kessler presents a portrait, both authoritative and affectionate, of a woman who didn't play by women's rules, a woman of large appetites--emotional, financial, and sexual--who called herself "the greatest conversation piece that ever existed."

About the Author

Lauren Kessler is the author of nine books, among them Stubborn Twig, which received the Frances Fuller Victor Award for the year's best work of literary nonfiction. She directs the grad-uate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where she lives with her husband and three children.