Wyatt Earp : a vigilante life / Andrew C. Isenberg.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013Edition: First editionDescription: 296 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrated, map ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 0809095009 (hardback)
- 9780809095001 (hardback)
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | Biography | Earp, W. I78 | Available | 33111007162502 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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 changingambitions 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.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-277) and index.
Map: Wyatt Earp's West -- The Earp family -- Lex talionis -- The sons of Ishmael -- Youth hath faulty wand'red -- Jerk your gun -- Wild justice -- Roping the mark -- The shadows of the past.