Herbert Asbury(September 1, 1889 – February 24, 1963) was a lively newspaper journalist best known for The Gangs of New York on which Martin Scorsese's movie of 2002 was so loosely based that it was nominated for an Oscar for "Best Original Screenplay." The movie brought Asbury's name to notice once more, and several of his "informal histories" as he called them were reissued. At the same time, the liberties the film took with Asbury's material suggested to some skeptics that Asbury took journalistic liberties with his anecdotal telling of his colorful but often unsourced material, absorbed from newpaper accounts and police blotters of the places and times he chronicled.
Herbert Asbury was a disenchanted Southern Methodist from Missouri who rebelled early against his strait-laced background, characterized its bigotry and hypoocrisy in his first book, and threw himself into the lore of urban crime, gangsterism, prostitution and gambling— as a popular historian. He had served in World War I, where he was gassed, permanently weakening his lungs.
Herbert Asbury achieved first notoriety with a story that H.L. Mencken published in his magazine, The American Mercury in 1926, the story of a Farmington prostitute who took her Protestant customers to the Roman Catholic cemetery and her Catholic customers to the Protestant cemetary and was considered beyond redemption in Asbury's home town, Farmington, Missouri. The Watch and Ward Society of Boston had the magazine banned from sale, whereupon Mencken took the train to Boston, sold a copy of his magazine on Boston Commons, and was arrested: sales of the recently-founded Mercury boomed, and Asbury was a celebrity. Asbury then worked into a book his debunking series of articles on Carrie Nation.
Many of Asbury's works, mostly chronicling the largely hidden history of the seamier side of American popular culture, have been reissued. They include New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors:
- Up From Methodism 1926. (The title is intended as a reminiscence of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery.)
- A Methodist Saint : The Life of Bishop Asbury1927. A biography of Asbury's progenitor, Rev. Francis Asbury
- The Devil of Pei-ling 1927. A novel.
- The Tick of the Clock 1928. A novel.
- The Gangs of New York : An Informal History of the Underworld 1928. Republished in 2001 with a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges.
- Not at Night: A Collection of Weird Tales
- The Bon Vivant's Companion : Or, How to Mix Drinks (with Jerry Thomas) 1928.
- [The Life of] Carry Nation 1928.
- Ye Olde Fire Laddies Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1930. An informal history of firefighting in New York City.
- The Barbary Coast : An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld 1933. 1933 ISBN 1560254084
- All Around the Town : Murder, Scandal, Riot and Mayhem in Old New York 1934. (reissued as a "Sequel to Gangs of New York)
- The Breathless Moment (with Philip van Doren Stern) 1935.
- The French Quarter : An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld 1936. ISBN 1560254947
- Sucker's Progress : An Informal History of Gambling in America 1938.
- Gem of the Prairie : An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld 1940. Northern Illinois University Press reissued it in 1986 with a preface by Perry R. Duis. It was again reissued as The Gangs of Chicago ISBN 1560254548
- The Golden Flood : An Informal History of America's First Oil Field Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1941 (often dated 1942).
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition 1950.
Asbury is credited with three crime-thriller screenplays for Columbia Pictures, which he co-wrote with Fred Niblo Jr:
- 1934 Name the Woman (A Cub reporter on the crime beat established the innocence of a woman he has wrongly implicated.) [1]
- 1934 Among the Missing Worked up from a "laughably implausible" (TV Guide) story by Florence Wagner
- 1934 Fugitive Lady
External link
