Up from Methodism

Herbert Asbury grew up in Farmington, Missouri, in a house where his great-great-uncle's portrait as the first American Methodist bishop watched over dinner table prayers. This is his furious, funny account of escaping that inheritance. The Ozarks of his childhood were a place where pleasure was damnation, the Sabbath strangled an entire town into silence, and the local prostitute had more dignity than the deacons who condemned her. Asbury writes with the precision of a Herald Tribune reporter and the bitterness of a son who learned that faith could be a cage. His title, a deliberate挑衅 to Booker T. Washington's autobiography, makes clear this is escape as defiance. The prose carries Mark Twain's Missouri earthiness, but sharper, aimed like a weapon at the hypocrisy he watched destroy lives while calling itself righteousness. When a single chapter landed in H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, it sparked arrests and free speech trials. Nearly a century later, the book still bites.