Dillinger's Wild Ride: The True Story of America's Public Enemy Number One - Perfect for History Buffs & True Crime Enthusiasts

Readers familiar with Elliott Gorn's previous books (The Manly Art, A Brief History of American Sports, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America) know the author of Dillinger's Wild Ride as a master historian and storyteller. Gorn, Professor of American Civilization and History at Brown University, tells us in his slyly self-effacing "Acknowledgments" that he has spent his career "working history's city desk," "writing about the likes of boxers and brawlers, labor organizers, and bank robbers." His unique mode of "history from below" has consistently deepened and complicated our understanding of the American past and American culture, and this is especially true of Dillinger's Wild Ride.The ostensible focus of the book is the period from 1933 to 1934, when Dillinger and his shifting band of fellow outlaws darted from state to state robbing banks, breaking out of prisons, embarrassing police and FBI agents, eluding capture, and capturing America's attention. But in Gorn's rich re-telling Dillinger's life story reveals the ways in which American icons shape and are shaped by the cultural moment. Gorn is particularly attuned to the ways in which Dillinger's increasingly audacious assaults on banks both fueled and expressed public frustration during the Great Depression, and he draws without dwelling on provocative parallels between that economic crisis and our own (Americans in the 30's got Dillinger; we get Bernie Madoff; go figure).Among its many virtues, Dillinger's Wild Ride offers an extended rumination on the ways history is rewritten (often in the making) to serve specific cultural needs. The book is framed by telling instances of this impulse. Chapter 1 reveals that even the famously fact-checking New Yorker rewrote Dillinger's life story while he was still alive. James Finan's 1934 essay for the magazine, published two months before Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago (betrayed by a woman in orange, not the woman in red of popular imagination) presents Dillinger as a product of small-town middle America, when in fact he spent most of his youth in the midsize metropolis of Indianapolis. But Gorn points out that Mooresville, Indiana, where Dillinger was born, "was not just a place, it was a metaphor by which Americans understood Dillinger's saga. Dillinger's Hoosier boyhood, followed by his descent in to crime, was an age-old American story: rural virtue and small-town honesty succumbing to urban vice." False though this trope was, it did not stop newspapers and magazines from glossing Dillinger's story "as a parable of America's declension from country virtues to city vices."While Gorn repeatedly subjects reductive representations of Dillinger to the refiner's fire of historical scrutiny, his book also shows us how and why American icons like Dillinger periodically return to haunt the popular imagination. The book's final chapter, "Dilinger's Ghost," presents Dillinger as a kind of cultural palimpsest--an image from the past that is reused and altered while still retaining traces of the original. From the 1935 film G-Men, in which James Cagney made his transition from gangster to federal agent, bringing down a Dillinger-like criminal, to the surprise 1973 hit Dillinger, in which Warren Oates portrays the outlaw as a tragic figure, morally superior to his cold-blooded adversary Melvin Purvis, Dillinger the man and icon has served disparate cultural agendas. Dillinger, like many films appearing between 1969 and 1973 (Bonnie and Clyde, Joe, Midnight Cowboy, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Little Big Man) reflects the disillusionment with American institutions that characterized the era, much as the public fascination with Dillinger in the last year of his life reflected disillusionment of a different but related kind. We know from advance screenings that Public Enemies, the new film about Dillinger, plays fast and loose with the historical record (Johnny Depp as Dillinger refers to the death of "Pretty Boy Floyd" even though Charles Arthur Floyd was killed three months after Dillinger himself was killed). It remains to be seen whether the film offers any imaginative truths about the man and the crisis-torn country that Elliott Gorn brings so compellingly to life in Dillinger's Wild Ride.