As a crime reporter and columnist for a good number of years, I received my share of hate mail and I’ve been confronted in public a couple of times by irate readers.
But unlike an earlier writer from Philadelphia, I’ve never been lynched.
Peter Carlson at
Historynet.com offers a good piece on Ned Buntline (seen in the above photo), the author of dime novels that
told tall tales about the lives of Wild West pioneers and lawmen.
Ned Buntline is the only American novelist who was lynched
by an angry mob and lived to tell the tale, although he much preferred telling
fictitious tales that made him seem heroic.
In 1846, Buntline, 23, was in Nashville, Tennessee, trying to
raise money for his magazine, Ned Buntline’s Own, and romancing a
local teenager. Her husband, Robert Porterfield, took umbrage and fired a
pistol at Buntline. Porterfield missed, fired again, missed again. Buntline
shot back, killing Porterfield. When the publisher was arraigned, a mob of
Porterfield’s friends invaded the courtroom, shooting. A bullet pierced
Buntline’s chest. He fled the courthouse into a nearby hotel, the horde in
pursuit. Cornered on the third floor, Buntline leaped out a window. Police
picked the stunned, bleeding writer off the ground and carried him to jail.
Porterfield’s pals broke into the hoosegow, hauled Buntline out, and hanged him
from a storefront awning. But somebody cut the rope and cops hauled Buntline
back to confinement.
Newspapers reported that Buntline died that night. They were
wrong. He lived another four decades, during which he published a scandal-sheet
newspaper, blackmailed brothel owners, led an anti-immigrant movement, incited
two riots, spent a year in prison, married six women, and wrote more than 300
pulp adventure novels.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Meet the Novelist Who Was Lynched By An Angry Mob and Lived to Tell the Tale | Historynet
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