Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends

By Allen Barra

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, History

Inventing Wyatt Earp (1998) is journalist Allen Barra's biography of the Western lawman and of the legends that grew around him. Barra traces Earp's life as a buffalo hunter, gambler and officer in Kansas cow towns, the gunfight near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, and his long final decades in California. He also examines how books, films and television turned Earp into a hero or villain and what the evidence actually shows.

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• Ryan Holiday: “In the last few weeks I read biographies or memoirs of: Fidel Castro, Toussaint Louverture, PT Barnum, Martin Luther, Langston Hughes, Arnold Rothstein, Wyatt Earp, George Washington, Seneca, Sammy Davis Jr, ... Da Vinci, ... Olaudah Equiano, and Joe Biden.”