Inventing Wyatt Earp

Inventing
Wyatt Earp

His Life and Many Legends

by
Allen Barra

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Inventing Wyatt Earp
This book reveals Wyatt Earp's astonishing life and the legend that grew around him which continues to determine our view of the American West. A biography and more--a smart and informative look at how myths are born and legends forged.

On October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp along with his two brothers and Doc Holliday shot it out with a gang of cattle rustlers near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. It was over in half a minute, but those thirty violent seconds made the 33-year-old Wyatt Earp the stuff of legend.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, however, neither launched nor climaxed a career that in the course of eighty-two colorful years took Wyatt Earp from an Iowa farm to the movie studios of Hollywood, where he worked as an advisor on film westerns. Along the way he saw real-life action as a buffalo hunter, bodyguard, detective, bounty hunter, gambler, boxing referee, prospector, saloon keeper, and, on occasion, a superb lawman.

This authoritative, new biography tells Wyatt Earp's story in all its amazing variety--a story the celebrated lawman shares with the likes of Bat Masterson, Earp's colleague on the Dodge City police force; the tubercular, gun-toting southern gentleman Doc Holliday; and Josephine Sarah Marcus, a beautiful Jewish girl from New York City who lived and traveled with Earp throughout the last forty-seven years of his life.

Wyatt Earp died in 1929, but the legend more than survived the man, invented and reinvented in history, fiction, and film, the story of a sometime lawman became the substance of a heroic myth that has been both glorified and debunked. Biographer Allen Barra examines not just the man from Iowa who went west and shot straight but also the more fabulous versions of Earp's exploits during his own lifetime as well as his incarnations in the myths that have flourished in our national imagination throughout these seventy years since his death.

Here is the table of contents: