**In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of
the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed
as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles
places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War
to reveal a much more complicated and significant figure.
**
"Carries the reader scrupulously through James's violent, violent
life.... When [Stiles]... calls Jesse James the 'last rebel of the
Civil War; he correctly defines the theme that ruled Jesse's life."
--Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove via
The New Republic
Raised in a fiercely pro-slavery household in bitterly divided Missouri,
at age sixteen James became a bushwhacker, one of the savage Confederate
guerrillas that terrorized the border states. After the end of the war,
James continued his campaign of robbery and murder into the brutal era
of reconstruction, when his reckless daring, his partisan
pronouncements, and his alliance with the sympathetic editor John Newman
Edwards placed him squarely at the forefront of the former Confederates'
bid to recapture political power.
With meticulous research and vivid accounts of the dramatic adventures
of the famous gunman, T. J. Stiles shows how he resembles not the
apolitical hero of legend, but rather a figure ready to use violence to
command attention for a political cause--in many ways, a forerunner of
the modern terrorist.
