Wyatt Earp

A biography of Wyatt Earp, drawing from newspaper stories as well as personal accounts from Earp's friends, enemies, and acquaintances.

Winner of the Best Book Award from the Wild West History Association True West Magazine Editors' and Readers' Choice award for Best Author and Historical Non-Fiction Book of the Year Wyatt Earp is one of the most legendary figures of the nineteenth-century American West, notable for his role in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He was a product of his time, often walking both sides of the street, sometimes on the side of law and order and sometimes as the law-breaker. Some see him as the "Lion of Tombstone," a hero lawman of the Wild West, whereas others see him as yet another outlaw, a pimp, and failed lawman. Roy B. Young, Gary L. Roberts, and Casey Tefertiller, all notable experts on Earp and the Wild West, present in A Wyatt Earp Anthology an authoritative account of his life, successes, and failures. The editors have curated an anthology of the very best work on Earp--more than sixty articles and excerpts from books--from a wide array of authors, selecting only the best written and factually documented pieces and omitting those full of suppositions or false material. Nearly all of the selections come from the last twenty years, when a more critical eye was turned to sources of Earp history. Many articles derive from the five stellar western publications dedicated to preserving the history of the American West: True West, Wild West, WOLA Journal, NOLA Quarterly, and the Journal of the Wild West History Association. Earp's life is presented in chronological fashion, from his early years to Dodge City, Kansas; triumph and tragedy in Tombstone; and his later years throughout the West. Important figures in Earp's life, such as Bat Masterson, the Clantons, the McLaurys, Doc Holliday, and John Ringo, are also covered. Wyatt Earp's image in film and the myths surrounding his life, as well as controversies over interpretations and presentations of his life by various writers, also receive their due. Finally, an extensive epilogue by Gary L. Roberts explores Earp and frontier violence. Readers of the Old West will appreciate this well-balanced, comprehensive account of the life, legend, and legacy of the incomparable Wyatt Earp.

Finalist for the 2014 Weber-Clements Book Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against organized crime (in the 1930s), communism (in the 1950s), and al-Qaeda (after 2001). Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction—one created by none other than Earp himself. The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasn't wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man. As Isenberg writes, "He donned and shucked off roles readily, whipsawing between lawman and lawbreaker, and pursued his changing ambitions recklessly, with little thought to the cost to himself, and still less thought to the cost, even the deadly cost, to others." By 1900, Earp's misdeeds had caught up with him: his involvement as a referee in a fixed heavyweight prizefight brought him national notoriety as a scoundrel. Stung by the press, Earp set out to rebuild his reputation. He spent his last decades in Los Angeles, where he befriended Western silent film actors and directors. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past. Isenberg argues that even though Earp, who died in 1929, did not live to see it, Hollywood's embrace of him as a paragon of law and order was his greatest confidence game of all. A searching account of the man and his enduring legend, and a book about our national fascination with extrajudicial violence, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life is a resounding biography of a singular American figure.

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place at October 26, 1881 in the famous Tombstone. It was fought between Ike Clanton, Billy Clanton, Billy Claiborne, Tom McLaury and Frank McLaury at one side and the lawmen Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp, Wyatt Earp and the dentist Doc Holliday at the other side. Wyatt Earp was accused of murder twice and the courts released him twice. Wyatt Earp narrates in this authentic report the gunfight from his own point of view.

Describes the life and legend of Wyatt Earp, from his early life and career as a lawman to his famous gunfights and his legacy that lives on in popular culture.