Ann R. Hammons - Wild Bill Sullivan: King of the Hollow

The rollicking history of a dreaded real-life figure in the folklore of the Mississippi backwoods Thanks to the subject of this fascinating book, Sullivans Hollow, a seemingly idyllic valley in south Mississippi, gained its rightful position among the notorious place names in American folklore. To the citizenry in the hamlets of Sullivans Hollow Wild Bill Sullivan was the fearsome local rascal whose bent for pranks, jokes, and chicanery quite often verged on the murderous. To travelers his name inspired a deadly dread of a chance meeting with him on a lonely trail. Wild Bills love of liquor and his bounding in and out of trouble embellished his darkly checkered reputation. For the annals of folklore he is prime material. Here for the first time in paperback is the story of this nineteenth-century Mississippi maverick, as told by his great-granddaughter. She recounts stories of his best-known pranks-such as stripping a Bible peddler naked and hitching him all day to a plow, and she puts a believable face on the legend of Wild Bills having killed fifty men (or more, as the story proliferates). What reader of this book could fail to believe that no traveler wanted to be passing through Sullivans Hollow after sundown?