HSPLS site
Login
My List - 0
Help
Search
My Account
Databases
HI Newspaper
eBooks/Audiobooks
Learning
PC Reservation
Reading Program
Basic
Advanced
Power
History
Search:
Title Browse
Author Browse
Subject Browse
Best Seller Browse
Music Title Browse
Video/DVD Title Browse
Journal/Newspaper Title Browse
Serial Title Browse
Series Browse (includes Bestseller List)
General Keyword
Title Keyword
Author Keyword
Subject Keyword
Name Keyword
Series Keyword
Score Title Browse
Talking Book Title Browse
Awards Note Browse
Bib No.
Barcode
Refine Search
> You're searching:
HAWAII STATE PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM
Item Information
Holdings
Summary
More Content
More by this author
Willetts, Paul, author.
Subjects
Laplante, Edgar, 1888-
Swindlers and swindling -- United States -- Biography.
Nineteen twenties.
Browse Catalog
by author:
Willetts, Paul, author.
by title:
King Con : the bizar...
MARC Display
King Con : the bizarre adventures of the Jazz Age's greatest impostor / Paul Willetts.
by
Willetts, Paul, author.
New York : Crown, [2018]
Subjects
Laplante, Edgar, 1888-
Swindlers and swindling -- United States -- Biography.
Nineteen twenties.
ISBN:
9780451495815 (hardcover) :
0451495810 (hardcover)
Description:
349 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Edition:
First edition.
Contents:
The fake's progress -- Continental grift.
Requests:
0
Summary:
"The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplante--the king of Jazz Age con artists--who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game. Edgar Laplante was a smalltime grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader--and total fraud. Under the pretenses of raising money for struggling Native American reservations, Laplante dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress and traveled throughout the American West, narrowly escaping exposure and arrest each time he left town. When the heat became too much, he embarked upon a lucrative continent-hopping tour that attracted even more enormous crowds, his cons growing in proportion to the adulation of his audience. As he moved through Europe, he spied his biggest mark on the Riviera: a prodigiously rich Hungarian countess, who was instantly smitten with the con man. The countess bankrolled a lavish trip through Italy that made Laplante a darling of the Mussolini regime and a worldwide celebrity, soaring to unimaginable heights on the wings of his lies. But then, at the pinnacle of his improbable success, Laplante's overreaching threatened to destroy him...In King Con, Paul Willetts brings this previously untold story to life in all its surprising absurdity, showing us how our tremendous capacity for belief and our longstanding obsession with celebrity can make fools of us all--and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction."--
Copy/Holding information
Location
Collection
Call No.
Status
Hawaii State Library
Social Science & Philosophy
364.16309 Laplante Wi
Checked In
Add Copy to MyList
Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9884
© 2001-2013
SirsiDynix
All rights reserved.