The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York

Ripped straight from the headlines of the Jazz Age, The Bobbed Haired Bandit is a tale of flappers and fast cars, of sex and morality. In the spring of 1924, a poor, 19-year-old laundress from Brooklyn robbed a string of New York grocery stores with a "baby automatic," a fur coat, and a fashionable bobbed hairdo. Celia Cooney's crimes made national news, with the likes of Ring Lardner and Walter Lippman writing about her exploits for enthralled readers.

The Bobbed Haired Bandit brings to life a world of great wealth and poverty, of Prohibition and class conflict. With her husband Ed at her side, Celia raised herself from a life of drudgery to become a celebrity in her own pulp-fiction novel, a role she consciously cultivated. She also launched the largest manhunt in New York City's history, humiliating the police with daring crimes and taunting notes.

Sifting through conflicting accounts, Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson show how Celia's story was used to explain the world, to wage cultural battles, to further political interest, and above all, to sell newspapers. To progressives, she was an example of what happens when a community doesn't protect its children. To conservatives, she symbolized a permissive society that gave too much freedom to the young, poor, and female. These competing stories distill the tensions of the time.

In a gripping account that reads like a detective serial, Duncombe and Mattson have culled newspaper reports, court records, interviews with Celia's sons, and even popular songs and jokes to capture what William Randolph Hearst's newspaper called "the strangest, weirdest, most dramatic, most tragic, human interest story ever told."

Author: Stephen Duncombe, Andrew Mattson
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 02/06/2006
Pages: 394
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.48lbs
Size: 9.30h x 8.26w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9780814719800


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/14/2005 pg. 56
Booklist 01/01/2006 pg. 32
Entertainment Weekly 02/24/2006 pg. 68

About the Author
Duncombe, Stephen: - Stephen Duncombe teaches politics and history of media and culture at the Gallatin School of New York University. He is author of Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader.Mattson, Andrew: - Andrew Mattson teaches American history and media studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.