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True Crime: An American Anthology

Fifty writers explore America’s uneasy fascination with violence and show the full spectrum of the true-crime genre More

Edited by Harold Schechter

“This anthology is almost obscenely entertaining . . . it is also a searching look at the dark underside of American reality, at an aspect of the human condition that both horrifies and fascinates us.”— The Washington Post

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Story of the Week Edmund Pearson, “Hell Benders, or The Story of a Wayside Tavern”
February 11, 2022

Story of the Week James Gordon Bennett, “The Recent Tragedy”
September 1, 2021

Story of the Week Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A show of wax-figures”
July 15, 2019

Americans have had an uneasy fascination with crime since the earliest European settlements in the New World, and right from the start true crime became a dominant genre in American writing. True Crime: An American Anthology offers the first comprehensive look at the many ways in which American writers have explored crime in a multitude of aspects: the dark motives that spur it, the shock of its impact on society, the effort to make sense of the violent extremes of human behavior. “The human community,” as Harold Schechter notes in his introduction, “finding itself under assault from within, searches desperately for a framework or context to explain the apparently unexplainable.”

Here is the full spectrum of the true-crime genre, from William Bradford’s account of the hanging of a murderer who came over on the Mayflower to Dominick Dunne’s relentless narrative of the case of the Menendez brothers. It focuses on some of the most notorious criminal cases in American history: the Helen Jewett murder, the assassination of President Garfield, the Snyder-Gray murder (the inspiration for Double Indemnity), Leopold and Loeb, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahlia, the Manson family, the “Son of Sam.”

True Crime presents the writing of a range of significant literary figures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of a visit to a waxworks exhibit of infamous crimes, Ambrose Bierce offering a cynical run-down of crime in 19th-century California, Mark Twain on frontier violence, New England poet Celia Thaxter on a shocking double killing, Theodore Dreiser observing a murder trial eerily reminiscent of his own American Tragedy, James Thurber revisiting the Hall-Mills murder case, Joseph Mitchell reporting on an execution, Elizabeth Hardwick interpreting the criminal career of Caryl Chessman, Truman Capote interviewing Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil. It draws as well on sources as varied as execution sermons, murder ballads, early broadsides and trial reports, and tabloid journalism of different eras. It also features the influential true-crime writing of best-selling contemporary practitioners like James Ellroy, Gay Talese, Albert Borowitz, and Ann Rule.

Harold Schechter, volume editor, is a professor of American literature at Queens College, the City University of New York. He is the author of more than two dozen books and is best known for his historical true-crime accounts, most recently The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century (2007). He is also the author of six novels, including a mystery series featuring Edgar Allan Poe.

This special hardcover publication features acid-free paper and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.
News & Views

Story of the Week Edmund Pearson, “Hell Benders, or The Story of a Wayside Tavern”
February 11, 2022

Story of the Week James Gordon Bennett, “The Recent Tragedy”
September 1, 2021

Story of the Week Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A show of wax-figures”
July 15, 2019

The Moviegoer Five chilling true-crime classics that capture primal American fears
October 6, 2016
Table of Contents

Introduction by Harold Schechter

William Bradford | The Hanging of John Billington
Cotton Mather | Pillars of Salt
Benjamin Franklin | The Murder of a Daughter
Anonymous | An Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J— Y—, Upon His Family, in December, A.D. 1781
Timothy Dwight | “A crime more atrocious and horrible than any other”
The Record of Crimes in the United States | Jesse Strang
James Gordon Bennett | The Recent Tragedy
Nathaniel Hawthorne | “A show of wax-figures”
Abraham Lincoln | Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder
Ambrose Bierce | Crime News from California
Mark Twain | from Roughing It
Anonymous | Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend
Lafcadio Hearn | Gibbeted
Celia Thaxter | A Memorable Murder
José Martí | The Trial of Guiteau
Thomas Byrnes | The Murder of Annie Downey, alias “Curly Tom”
Frank Norris | Hunting Human Game
Susan Glaspell | The Hossack Murder
Murder Ballads | Poor Naomi | Stackalee | The Murder of Grace Brown | Belle Gunness | The Murder at Fall River | Trail’s End
Thomas S. Duke | Mrs. Cordelia Botkin, Murderess
Edmund Pearson | Hell Benders, or The Story of a Wayside Tavern
Damon Runyon | The Eternal Blonde
Herbert Asbury | from The Gangs of New York
Alexander Woollcott | The Mystery of the Hansom Cab
Joseph Mitchell | Execution
H. L. Mencken | More and Better Psychopaths
Theodore Dreiser | Dreiser Sees Error in Edwards Defense
Dorothy Kilgallen | Sex and the All-American Boy
Edna Ferber | Miss Ferber Views “Vultures” at Trial
Jim Thompson | Ditch of Doom
James Thurber | A Sort of Genius
Meyer Berger | Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street
John Bartlow Martin | Butcher’s Dozen
A. J. Liebling | The Case of the Scattered Dutchman
Zora Neale Hurston | The Trial of Ruby McCollum
Jack Webb | The Black Dahlia
Elizabeth Hardwick | The Life and Death of Caryl Chessman
Robert Bloch | The Shambles of Ed Gein
Miriam Allen deFord | Superman’s Crime: Loeb and Leopold
W. T. Brannon | Eight Girls, All Pretty, All Nurses, All Slain
Don Moser | The Pied Piper of Tucson
Calvin Trillin | A Stranger with a Camera
Gay Talese | Charlie Manson’s Home on the Range
Truman Capote | Then It All Came Down
Jimmy Breslin | “Son of Sam”
Jay Robert Nash | The Turner-Stompanato Killing: A Family Affair
Albert Borowitz | The Medea of Kew Gardens Hills
James Ellroy | My Mother’s Killer
Ann Rule | Young Love
Dominick Dunne | Nightmare on Elm Drive
Contributors

Herbert Asbury
Alexander Beard
James Gordon Bennett
Meyer Berger
Ambrose Bierce
Robert Bloch
Albert Borowitz
William Bradford
W. T. Brannon
Jimmy Breslin
Thomas Byrnes
Truman Capote
Miriam Allen deFord
Theodore Dreiser
Dominick Dunne
Thomas S. Duke
Timothy Dwight
James Ellroy
Edna Ferber
Benjamin Franklin
Susan Glaspell
Elizabeth Hardwick
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lafcadio Hearn
Zora Neale Hurston
Dorothy Kilgallen
A. J. Liebling
Abraham Lincoln
José Martí
John Barlow Martin
Cotton Mather
H. L. Mencken
Joseph Mitchell
Don Moser
Jay Robert Nash
Frank Norris
Edmund Pearson
Ann Rule
Damon Runyon
Gay Talese
Celia Thaxter
Jim Thompson
James Thurber
Calvin Trillin
Mark Twain
Jack Webb
Alexander Woollcott

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