Alice May And Bruising Bill

Alice May and Bruising Bill is an 1845 double tale by Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860), the antebellum American author whose output of cheap paper-covered novels outpaced every rival of the 1840s. The volume pairs two short fictions in Ingraham’s city-and-river manner: the story of the virtuous Alice May and the rough waterman Bruising Bill, working the contrasts of innocence and violence, low life and redemption, that the popular story-paper public demanded. Ingraham produced this fiction at industrial speed before abandoning the trade for the Episcopal ministry and the religious best-sellers of his last decade. The little book is a primary specimen of the pamphlet novel, the format through which sensational fiction reached the widest antebellum American audience. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.