Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride - Hardcover

Wallis, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060683 ISBN 13: 9780393060683

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

From the best-selling author of Route 66 comes this long-awaited biography of one of America’s most legendary folk heroes.

Award-winning historian Michael Wallis has spent several years re-creating the rich, anecdotal saga of Billy the Kid (1859–1881), a deeply mythologized young man who became a legend in his own time and yet remains an enigma to this day. With the Gilded Age in full swing and the Industrial Revolution reshaping the American landscape, “the Kid,” who was gunned down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in the New Mexico Territory at the age of twenty-one, became a new breed of celebrity outlaw. He arose amid the mystery and myth of the swiftly vanishing frontier and, sensationalized beyond recognition by the tabloids and dime-store romances of the day, emerged as one of the most enduring icons of the American West―not to mention one of Hollywood’s most misrepresented characters. This new biography, filled with dozens of rare images and period photographs, separates myth from reality and presents an unforgettable portrait of this brief and violent life.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Wallis, author of The Best Land Under Heaven and the best-selling Route 66 and Billy the Kid, has published nineteen books and won numerous awards and honors. He is a popular public speaker and voice actor and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Reviews

Starred Review. The boy who would become Billy the Kid (1859–1881) was born Henry McCarty, perhaps in the Irish immigrant wards of New York City. Not much is known about his parents, and it's difficult to trace his whereabouts until his family turned up in Silver City, Colo., in the early 1870s. Both the facts and the legend pick up in 1877, when Henry—already known to some under the alias Kid—shot a man who was bullying him and began a life on the run. Wallis's reconstruction of the Kid's exploits is engrossing. But even more, Wallis (Route 66) shows Billy the Kid as a product of his era, one of profound social dislocation. Billy the Kid was, indeed, only the most legendary of a generation of "desperate men" who knew how to handle a gun. At the same time, a new kind of sensationalist journalism was being created, and reporters were more than happy to contribute to the creation of a myth. Wallis, the host of PBS's new American Roads, writes clean prose, occasionally enlivened by a particularly lovely turn of phrase ("the liquid rustle of cottonwood leaves"). Over the decades, countless books have been written about the infamous outlaw, and this is surely one of the best. 60 illus. (Mar.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393060683
• ISBN 13: 9780393060683
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352