Doc Holliday

Acclaim for Doc Holliday "Splendid . . . not only the most readable yet definitive study of Holliday yet published, it is one of the best biographies of nineteenth-century Western 'good-bad men' to appear in the last twenty years. It was so vivid and gripping that I read it twice." --Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University, and author of The New Encyclopedia of the American West "The history of the American West is full of figures who have lived on as romanticized legends. They deserve serious study simply because they have continued to grip the public imagination. Such was Doc Holliday, and Gary Roberts has produced a model for looking at both the life and the legend of these frontier immortals." --Robert M. Utley, author of The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull "Doc Holliday emerges from the shadows for the first time in this important work of Western biography. Gary L. Roberts has put flesh and soul to the man who has long been one of the most mysterious figures of frontier history. This is both an important work and a wonderful read." --Casey Tefertiller, author of Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend "Gary Roberts is one of a foremost class of writers who has created a real literature and authentic history of the so-called Western. His exhaustively researched and beautifully written Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend reveals a pathetically ill and tortured figure, but one of such intense loyalty to Wyatt Earp that it brought him limping to the O.K. Corral and into the glare of history." --Jack Burrows, author of John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was "Gary L. Roberts manifested an interest in Doc Holliday at a very early age, and he has devoted these past thirty-odd years to serious and detailed research in the development and writing of Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. The world knows Holliday as Doc Holliday. Family members knew him as John. Somewhere in between the two lies the real John Henry Holliday. Roberts reflects this concept in his writing. This book should be of interest to Holliday devotees as well as newly found readers." --Susan McKey Thomas, cousin of Doc Holliday and coauthor of In Search of the Hollidays

Doc Holiday Matt Braun He came from the American South, a gentleman by breeding, a dentist by training, a gambler by vocation. But as Dr. John H. Holliday, a man fleeing his tragic past, drifted across the West, living among some of the roughest men on the frontier, word spread quickly he never walked away from a fight, and he never drew too late. Now, from Dodge City to Denver and Cheyenne, from boomtown to sinkholes, "Doc" Holliday was driven by the demons of his past, a skilled gambler and a seasoned mankiller--his name was known and feared long before the O.K. Corral. The story of a man who spoke softly and carried a lightning gun, Doc Holliday is Matt Braun's extraordinary chronicle of the West's most complex and legendary figure.

His name conjures images of the Wild West, of gunfights and gambling halls and a legendary friendship with the lawman Wyatt Earp, and he is probably most famous for his time in Tombstone. But Doc Holliday’s story is a much richer than that one sentence summary allows. His was a life of travel across the west—from Georgia to Texas, from Dodge City to Las Vegas, across Arizona and from New Mexico to Colorado and Montana. Revealed from contemporary newspaper accounts and records of interviews with Doc himself and the people who knew him and packed with archival photos and illustrations, The World of Doc Holliday offers a real first-hand accounting of his life of adventure.

A fresh, lively retelling of the life of one of the most infamous characters of the Old West, Doc Holliday, by an imaginative, yet accurate storyteller.

THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Tombstone is written in a distinctly American voice." —T.J. Stiles, The New York Times “With a former newsman’s nose for the truth, Clavin has sifted the facts, myths, and lies to produce what might be as accurate an account as we will ever get of the old West’s most famous feud.” —Associated Press The true story of the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the famous Battle at the OK Corral, by the New York Times bestselling author of Dodge City and Wild Bill. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, eight men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in thirty seconds, killing three men and wounding three others. The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer. Cattle rustlers had been terrorizing the back country of Mexico and selling the livestock they stole to corrupt ranchers. The Mexican government built forts along the border to try to thwart American outlaws, while Arizona citizens became increasingly agitated. Rustlers, who became known as the cow-boys, began to kill each other as well as innocent citizens. That October, tensions boiled over with Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne confronting the Tombstone marshal, Virgil Earp, and the suddenly deputized Wyatt and Morgan Earp and shotgun-toting Doc Holliday. Bestselling author Tom Clavin peers behind decades of legend surrounding the story of Tombstone to reveal the true story of the drama and violence that made it famous. Tombstone also digs deep into the vendetta ride that followed the tragic gunfight, when Wyatt and Warren Earp and Holliday went vigilante to track down the likes of Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, and other cowboys who had cowardly gunned down his brothers. That "vendetta ride" would make the myth of Wyatt Earp complete and punctuate the struggle for power in the American frontier's last boom town.

John H. Holliday, D. D. S., better known as Doc Holliday, has become a legendary figure in the history of the American West. In Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait, Karen Holliday Tanner reveals the real man behind the legend. Shedding light on Holliday’s early years, in a prominent Georgia family during the Civil War and Reconstruction, she examines the elements that shaped his destiny: his birth defect, the death of his mother and estrangement from his father, and the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which led to his journey west. The influence of Holliday’s genteel upbringing never disappeared, but it was increasingly overshadowed by his emerging western personality. Holliday himself nurtured his image as a frontier gambler and gunman. Using previously undisclosed family documents and reminiscences as well as other primary sources, Tanner documents the true story of Doc’s friendship with the Earp brothers and his run-ins with the law, including the climactic shootout at the O. K. Corral and its aftermath. This first authoritative biography of Doc Holliday should appeal both to historians of the West and to general readers who are interested in his poignant story.

A novel based on the life of Kate Elder, a courageous, independent woman who survived alone on the frontier, from St. Louis to the OK Corral, and eventually became Doc Holliday's mistress. The author has drawn on sources such as interviews with Kate Elder herself in the 1930s and other accounts and memoirs to build a vision of the Wild West that is at once accurate, and compelling.

You’ve heard Doc Holliday’s history, but do you know his story? His name conjures images of the Wild West, of gunfights and gambling halls and a legendary friendship with Wyatt Earp, but before Doc Holliday was a Western legend, he was a Southern Son. The story begins in Civil War Georgia, as young John Henry Holliday welcomes home his heroic father and learns a terrible secret about his mother, with his only confidant his favorite cousin Mattie. As the Confederacy falls and tragedy strikes, John Henry’s hero-worship turns to bitter anger and he joins with a gang of vigilantes to chase the Reconstruction Yankees out of their small Georgia town. When their murderous plot is discovered and brings threats of military prison, he vows to change his reckless ways, leaving home to attend dental school in Philadelphia and hoping to become a respected professional man worthy of asking for his cousin Mattie’s hand. But when he returns from two years in the North he finds family intrigues, lies and revelations, rivals for Mattie’s affections—and a violent encounter that changes everything and starts him on the road to Western legend. Southern Son is the first book in the award-winning Saga of Doc Holliday, an epic American tale of heroes and villains, dreams lost and found, families broken and reconciled, of sin and recompense and the redeeming power of love.