Brann and the Iconoclast
"They wouldn't let him rest—even in his grave." Thus Charles Carver opens his story of the climactic years of a journalist who had poured out such blazing prose that readers from England to Hawaii mourned his murder.
The impact of William Cowper Brann's Iconoclast upon the town of Waco, Texas, in the 1890's was like a rocket burst in a quiet sky. Rebelling against Victorian hypocrisy, the newspaperman took aim at organized virtue, exemplified for him by Baylor University and other Baptist organizations.
Dr. Roy Bedichek, noted author and naturalist, knew Brann, and after reading this book in manuscript said, "I am at once delighted and disappointed: disappointed to find my teen-age hero reduced to size... delighted with the art of the biographer.... It has genuine literary excellence... is a chapter in the history of the publishing business in Texas that needs to be put into print...."
Charles Carver here tells a tragic story that makes you swell at the majesty of man's mind and shrink at his rotten vanity.
[Carver] ... tells, tersely and fairly, the story of the brilliant and rambunctious William Cowper Brann, the hot-eyed itinerant newspaperman who settled down in Waco, Texas, in the 1890's and made a spectacular frontal assault upon what he conceived to be the idiocies and hypocrisies of his time ...
- Introduction
- Prologue
- 1. The “Romish Conspiracy”
- 2. Carlyle and the Courthouse Run
- 3. “The Athens of Texas”
- 4. Attack—and Sell
- 5. The Crime
- 6. The Defense
- 7. The Course of Justice
- 8. Pot Pourri
- 9. “Sexual Purity and Gunpowder”
- 10. The Abduction
- 11. The Whipping
- 12. “Ropes, Revolvers, and Religion”
- 13. “Six-Shooter Depot”
- 14. “Go Cork Yourselves”
- 15. “Come along, Mr. Brann!”
- Epilogue
- Source Material
- Index
