Up from Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil

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Description

In 1926, even as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, Herbert Asbury, great-great-nephew of Francis Asbury, the first American Bishop of the Methodist Church, submitted a chapter of his profane work-in-progress, an almost spiteful memoir of his boyhood within the Ozark town of Farmington, Missouri, to H.L Mencken’s American Mercury magazine. Mencken published “Hatrack,” the tale of the town’s prostitute, within the April issue. The Mercury used to be then banned in Boston on the incitement of J. Frank Chase, the head of the New England Watch and Ward Society, who known as the tale “bad, vile, raw stuff.” Mencken used to be arrested selling the magazine to Chase on Boston Common in a stunt designed to impress the free-speech trials that followed. In its restrained, but unrelenting attack on religious bigotry, irrationality, and hypocrisy, the book that used to be published soon thereafter retains its transgressive power as of late. Its taunting title, playing on Booker T. Washington’s early-century bestseller Up from Slavery, gives an idea of what Asbury thought he had escaped. In his mocking humor and plain-spun language, used to rouse a bygone South suffocating in its fear of pleasure and damnation, Asbury reveals his debt to some other son of Missouri, Mark Twain.

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