cover image The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Central Pacific Railroad

The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Central Pacific Railroad

Dennis Drabelle. St. Martin’s, $26.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-312-66759-7

Drabelle (Mile High Fever), the Washington Post Book World’s mysteries editor and an NBCC Award–winning critic, celebrates “a free press and writers eager to give the rich and powerful hell” in his telling of the Central Pacific’s attempts to avoid repaying U.S. government bonds. In 1896, William Randolph Hearst sent Ambrose Bierce to report on Congress’s deliberations on a railroad funding bill. Seeing the bribe money distributed by the railroad’s lobbyists, Bierce marshaled public opinion against the bill. A decade later, novelist Frank Norris skewered the railroad in his acclaimed novel The Octopus. Drabelle delivers sufficient details on the shenanigans involved in building the railroads to support his antimonopoly slant, plus enough digressions to create a sense of immersion into the literary culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Abolitionist and famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher, novelist Stephen Crane, movie director Erich von Stroheim, and sundry politicians make cameo appearances to good effect. Drabelle links the Progressive anticorruption reforms—ballot initiatives, public referendums, and recalls of elected officials—to present-day political stalemates. Readers with interests in western American history or the origins of today’s political quagmires will find much to relish. Agent: Mitchell Waters, Curtis Brown. (Aug.)