Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast, Volume 1

He was the original American contrarian, a newspaper man who made enemies the way other men made friends. William Cowper Brann published The Iconoclast from Waco, Texas in the 1890s, and he attacked everything: Baptists and Catholics, universities and Prohibition, the pious and the powerful. His prose was a leather-gloved fist wrapped in wit, and he wielded it without hesitation or apology. They called him the Iconoclast, and he earned it. He wrote with the kind of fervor that got men killed in the frontier West, and indeed it did. At forty-three, shot in the back by a man he had publicly humiliated, Brann drew his own weapon, killed his attacker, and walked to jail before he died the next morning. He was a man who lived by the gun and the pen, and he died the way he wrote: in a blaze of defiance. This volume collects his essential writings, a time capsule from a Texas that no longer exists, populated by men who believed fighting was holy and honor was worth dying for.