[1] Born in Farmington, Missouri, he was raised in a highly religious family which included several generations of devout Methodist preachers.
[citation needed] When he was in his early teens, he and his siblings Mary, Emmett and Fred Asbury became disenchanted with the local Southern Methodist church.
The 2002 film Gangs of New York by director Martin Scorsese about the underworld and civil strife / riots among immigrant groups from the 1840s to the Civil War era revitalized interest in Asbury, and many of Asbury's works, mostly chronicling the largely hidden history of the seamier side of American popular culture, have been reissued.
[3] In 2008, The Library of America selected an excerpt from The Gangs of New York for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
Although his books have long been popular within the true crime genre, commentators such as Lucy Sante,[4] Tyler Anbinder[5] and Tracy Melton[6] have suggested that Asbury took journalistic liberties with his material.
New York City newspapers compared the Dead Rabbits to the Baltimore Plug Uglies following the July 4, 1857, riots, which occurred just a month after Plug Ugly involvement in the Know-Nothing Riot in Washington, D.C. Asbury is credited with several crime-thriller screenplays for Columbia Pictures, which he co-wrote with Fred Niblo Jr (1903–1973):