Negley Farson

Who was Negley Farson?

James Negley Farson, was an American author and adventurer.

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Farson was raised by his eccentric grandfather, the Civil War General James Negley. He was educated at Andover and read civil engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was expelled from this institution and emigrated to England. He went into journalism and travelled to Russia, being present in Petrograd the day the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. Farson went on to become one of the most renowned foreign correspondents of his day, interviewing Gandhi in India, witnessing Gandhi's arrest in Poona, witnessing bank-robber John Dillinger's naked body in the morgue just after he had been shot down by Hoover’s men and meeting Hitler, who described Farson’s blond son, Daniel, as a “good Aryan boy.”

A renowned fisherman, Farson wrote one of the classics of fishing literature, Going Fishing. The story of his life is told in his two volumes of autobiography "The Way Of a Transgressor" and "A Mirror for Narcissus".

He partied with F. Scott Fitzgerald and supposedly out-drank Ernest Hemingway.