Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

1986, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 316 pages

The Manly Art is the best single history of boxing I have read—and, I have read over 150 such books. This is a comprehensive study of the English roots of the ‘Prize-Ring’ and the American co-opting of the tradition. If you have seen Gangs of New York and find that period in American history [so overshadowed by the Civil War and the frontier experience] fascinating, then The Manly Art is a good first read.

Gorn specializes in 19th Century masculine culture in America, which was more divorced from female culture than what we have now. He also focuses on the working class, where authors of British prize-fighting focus on the aristocratic patronage of the working class fighting man with little accompanying illumination concerning his plight.

The Manly Art is a comprehensive study of the working class origins of the American—and now global—celebrity culture. A close reading of Gorn’s monumental study will uncover the fact that every Hollywood star, every hip-hop celebrity, every TV personality, and every sports champion, can trace his lineage back to the Irish-American and Nativist-American bruisers who lived in an industrial urban netherworld of barrooms, whorehouses, dockyards, cobblestone streets, and dog-fighting pits. If we see parallels with 19th Century masculine culture we will find it mostly amid the ruins of Western Civilization we call ‘hip-hop culture’. This is clearly borne out in Gorn’s book, not by comparison, but simply due to his methodical scholarship, creative composition, and lively narrative style. Songs of the period, sung in bars, and celebrating gang activity, are sprinkled through the book, as are copious illustrations and excerpts from periodicals.

I use The Manly Art as a resource when writing fiction set in 19th Century America, or utilizing characters of this period. I am indebted to Mister Gorn for The Spiral Case serial and the novel the World is Our Widow. The Manly Art is a superb culture study and resource for boxing and urban history writers. I cannot recommend it highly enough.