The Purple Knight of the Ozarks

In 1897, a young Ozark newspaperman named T. Allen McQuary claimed that a Little Rock plantation owner had promised him $5,000 and his daughter's hand in marriage if he could circumnavigate the globe dressed as a purple knight. The quest was a fabrication. The plantation owner's daughter never existed. But McQuary's extraordinary journey across America—traceable through surviving newspaper archives from Missouri to Charleston to Oregon—was bizarrely real.

This serialized novel follows McQuary's actual path through court records, newspaper clippings, and a surviving promotional pamphlet. Watch as he transforms from small-town con artist to postmaster to embezzler, spinning increasingly grandiose tales in churches, schools, and Masonic halls across the country until his tragic end in 1948.

Each chapter is accompanied by historical documentation, photographs, and newspaper articles that reveal the thin line between McQuary's fiction and his reality. This is the story of America's most persistent and creative liar—a man who turned deception into performance art and performance art into a way of life.