Titles

Riding the Edge: A Motorcycle Outlaw's Tale

John Hall 2008
MBI Publishing and Motorbooks
ISBN: 978-0-7603-3276-4

In the 1960s, John Hall, a Harley-riding hell-raiser, hooked up with the Pagans, a group of like-minded individuals who went on to become the largest outlaw motorcycle club on the East Coast. Hall and the Pagans rode roughshod across the Eastern Seaboard throughout the 1960s, until John and six other Pagans ended up in the Pennsylvania State Penitentiary. While in prison, John began taking college classes and earned several degrees.

Now after a career as a journalist and college professor, he returns to the violent days of his youth and smashes up stereotypes like he once smashed up bars, resurrecting long-dead brothers in a writing style that is part Raymond Carver and part Jack Kerouac. Hall presents the Pagans as they really were: hard-living, hard-loving, hard-drinking, hard-fighting rebels, but also hard-working patriots, loyal, lovable characters, a band of brothers whose outlandish behavior forged an all-American outlaw legend in the tradition of Jesse James, Doc Holliday, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

Author Bio

John Hall, a former chapter president of the Long Island Pagans, has done time in the state pen, as well as Penn State, where he taught history, American studies, rhetoric, and mathematics. He also worked as a bouncer, bartender, bookmaker, stonemason, professional gambler, law clerk, and freelance journalist. He has written over 400 syndicated opinion columns, which have appeared in over a dozen newspapers, including the Houston Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has raised seven children, half the time as a single parent. He currently lives in a 127-year-old dilapidated farmhouse in the Appalachian Mountains, where he seeks what George Jean Nathan once described as the three essentials of life: reasonably well-prepared food, a moderately alcoholic diet, and the amiable company of amiable women.