author
Asbury Harpending
1839–1923
Drawn to schemes, speculation, and high adventure, this Kentucky-born memoirist lived a life colorful enough to rival his own stories. His writing opens a lively window onto mining booms, financial gambles, and the famous diamond hoax of the American West.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1839, Asbury Harpending became known as an adventurer and financier whose career carried him through California, Mexico, and New York. He was involved in mining, land, railroad, and other speculative ventures, and later turned many of those experiences into memoir-like writing.
He is best remembered today for The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending, a 1913 book that helped preserve his version of several dramatic episodes from the 19th-century American West. Archival collections of his papers also show how wide-ranging his business interests were over the course of his life.
Harpending died in 1923. What makes him interesting as an author is not just what he wrote, but how closely his writing grew out of a restless, risk-filled life shaped by boomtown ambition, political intrigue, and old frontier mythology.