The Spark: The Life of Marshall "Major" Taylor, 1878-1897

In May 1948, a dozen old men drove automobiles to a cemetery outside Chicago to put a bronze marker on a pauper's grave. They had spent their best years on bicycles. Some of them, forty years earlier, had done everything in their power to break the man they had come to honor: boxed him into the rail, thrown elbows into his ribs at forty miles an hour, split purses in hotel rooms so the fastest rider on the boards would come away with nothing.

He had been dead sixteen years.

The Spark is the story of how he got there, and it begins a long way back.Indianapolis, 1878. Gilbert Taylor comes home from the war with his hands ruined for anything but horses, and the trade the country will let a Black veteran keep is the management of another man's stable. His son Marshall is lent out to a wealthy white family as a companion for their boy, given a bicycle, given a life he can see but not hold. Then the door closes, the family moves away, and the boy is returned to his own with a machine he now knows how to ride better than almost anyone alive.

What follows is a decade of doors: the cycling clubs that would not have him, the rule written to keep him off the track, the Southern swing where hotels turned him away in towns where he was the main attraction. And through all of it, a body that would not stop being faster than everyone else's.

By 1897 he is a professional, the most admired and most controversial rider in America, and the sport is heading for a schism with him at the center of it.

This is narrative history, anchored to the documented record: the race results, the ledgers, the newspaper columns that praised him on one page and campaigned against him on the next. Thirty-one chapters, from a coachman's son to the first line of a bronze plaque.

Book One of The Fastest Human on Earth. The Reign and Retribution and Resurrection follow.

For the ones the record forgot, and the ones who went looking.

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