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![]() Jesse James [Brad Pitt] was one of the country’s first bona fide celebrities. There have been countless books written and tales told about America’s most famous outlaw—all of them colorful and fascinating, all focused on his larger-than-life public persona and daring exploits, and most of them bearing only incidental reference to the truth.
To those he robbed and terrorized, and to the families of those he admittedly killed, he may have been just a criminal, but in the sensational newspaper articles and dime novels chronicling the James Gang throughout the 1870s, Jesse was the object of awe and admiration.
He was a Robin Hood, they suggested, targeting railroad owners and banks that exploited poor farmers. He was a man with a tragic cause, a wronged and wounded Confederate soldier striking back against the Union that had ruined his life.
Most importantly, to an increasingly buttoneddown and citified population leading ordinary lives, he was the last frontiersman—a symbol of freedom and the American spirit, a charismatic rebel who flouted the law and lived by his own rules…by all accounts, a legend.
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