ABSTRACT
Daniel Mendoza held the title of heavyweight Champion of England from 1792 to 1795. Arguably the most famous fighter of his time, he fought during the renaissance of bare-knuckle boxing. His rise to stardom in the late 1780s was so precipitous that one biographer wrote, “The outbreak of the French Revolution was inside-page news in the journals of 1789, because in those July days Mendoza made front page news with boxing’s first literary work, The Art of Boxing.” 1 His 1816 Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza was the first autobiography written by a pugilist. 2
