← Return to Chapter One

Chapter One: Historical Notes

Technology and Literary Influences

The Printing Press

McQuary would have used a press similar to this Prouty model in his newspaper work:

The Prouty press, nicknamed the "grasshopper" for its distinctive mechanical arms, was a common fixture in small-town newspapers of the 1890s. The rhythmic "ki-diddle-ka-daddle" sound that tormented young McQuary was produced by the press's feeding mechanism and printing drum working in constant repetition.

The Tedium of Small-Town Journalism

McQuary's frustration with the endless cycle of printing local news—"wayward livestock, county elections, faceless obituaries, and the cost of corn"—reflects the limited horizons of rural newspaper work in 1897. For a young man with literary ambitions and a taste for adventure stories, such work would indeed feel like a prison.

The irony is that McQuary would later use his newspaper skills to create and promote his own fantastic story, turning the very medium of his boredom into the instrument of his fame.

T. A. McQuary's Reading List

The books that shaped a future con man's imagination:

McQuary's reading ranged from the literary to the lurid. The Gothic doubles and scientific romances shaped his public fantasies, while the forbidden books perhaps fed darker private imaginings. All texts listed are in the public domain.

The Psychology of Literary Influence

McQuary's reading reveals a mind drawn to stories of transformation, deception, and dual identity. His fascination with Jekyll and Hyde's philosophy of the "truly two" nature of man provided the intellectual framework for his later scheme. McQuary discovered this same duality in Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson," the story of a dissolute young man plagued by his "good" doppelganger. Like the story of Jekyll and Hyde, "William Wilson" posed a riddle that McQuary was determined to solve, for he too was pricked by his good conscience.

The combination of gothic romance (Dracula, Wuthering Heights), adventure fiction (Verne, Twain), and pseudo-scientific works on mesmerism created a potent cocktail of influences that would manifest in his Purple Knight persona.

Particularly telling is his interest in Mesmer's "animal magnetism" and du Maurier's Svengali—both dealing with psychological manipulation and control, skills McQuary would employ to great effect in his performances and lectures. Equally important to Mack was the discovery of this provocative claim in A. E. Waite's The Occult Sciences: "The suspension of will which accompanies the hypnotic state, placing the subject, in mind, morals, and body, at the complete disposal of the operator, also controls the individuality, which can be effaced and transformed according to the necessities of any experiment." Further in the same paragraph, Mack read, "In some cases a new and underlying personality will spontaneously manifest, and if the hypnotic condition be prolonged, several of an opposite kind, and all more or less foreign to the patient's normal nature, will appear in periodical succession: an educated and virtuous person may develop a low and vicious character, while a low type of humanity will exhibit in the profundities of his being a higher form of consciousness" (243-44). That is, McQuary found in mesmerism, i.e., hypnotism, the possibility of manipulating others but also a means of reconciling and utilizing the good and bad personalities within himself.

← Return to Chapter One Subscribe for Full Story Back to Home