In the economically uncertain and often morally seamy world of sporting journalism in nineteenth-century America, Frank Queen and his weekly New York Clipper occupied a place that was both in step and oddly out of step with his sportswriting contemporaries. Queen's philosophy and practice of sports and entertainment journalism fell somewhere between the more agrarian and aristocratic approach of William Trotter Porter and his Spirit of the Times and the gritty, sexually exploitative approach of Richard Kyle Fox and his National Police Gazette. Although it was an eclectic blend of sports reporting, fiction, verse, and stage news, Queen's Clipper, especially in its sports coverage, was more clearly a precursor of the early-twentieth-century daily sports section than was any other publication of the nineteenth century.

With Harrison Trent, whose primary role was to provide the financial backing, Queen founded the New York Clipper in 1853. Unlike the majority of the...