Elmer McCurdy: The Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw Book

The short-lived misadventures of an American outlaw--and the seventy-year adventure of his corpse--trace a journey through America's long fascination with the exotic, the freakish, the sensational, and the illicit. This is the story of Elmer McCurdy, a failed plumber from Bangor, Maine, who went west to become an even less successful bad guy. He arrived in Oklahoma a few decades after the golden age of the outlaw and attempted to resurrect the lost art of train robbing, but his criminal skills were so deficient that he bungled every robbery he attempted. His contemporaries were amused by the incompetent throwback, but when McCurdy was shot dead in 1911 by a posse of deputy marshals, popular sentiment suddenly drafted him into the glorified criminal league. Able to recognize a fetish in the making, two men from a passing carnival hoodwinked a sheriff and claimed McCurdy's corpse. Thus began a post-mortem career in show business that lasted until 1976, when McCurdy's body was discovered in a California amusement ride. Mark Svenvold has reconstructed the bizarre itinerary of the corpse, its many years on the sideshow circuit and its second career as a cautionary prop in morality movies like I Changed My Sex. By exploring the underside of American entertainment and by following how McCurdy was presented to the public after his death, Svenvold also shows how our culture's deepest obsessions have changed over the course of a century. A lively and engaging chronicle of a man who was as hapless in death as he was in life, Elmer McCurdy is a narrative of our collective affinity for nostalgia, celebrity, the wonderful, the abnormal and the outrageous. Read More