Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends

On October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp, 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 turned the thirty-three-year-old Wyatt Earp into the stuff of legend. In truth, however, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral 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 Western films. 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 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. Biographer Allen Barra also examines the more fantastic versions of Earp's exploits told during his own lifetime, as well as his incarnations in the myths that have flourished in our national imagination throughout the seventy years since his death. Allen Barra is a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the New York Sun and is the author of several books, including Clearing the Bases (available in a Bison Books edition), The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant, and Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee.

Author: Allen Barra
Publisher: Bison
Published: 01/01/2009
Pages: 460
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.90w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9780803220584
ISBN10: 0803220588
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Historical
- Biography & Autobiography | Law Enforcement
- History | United States | 19th Century

About the Author
Allen Barra is a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the New York Sun and is the author of several books, including Clearing the Bases (available in a Bison Books edition), The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant, and the forthcoming Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee.