American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett - Softcover

Levy, Buddy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425210081 ISBN 13: 9780425210086

Publisher: Berkley Trade, 2006

Synopsis

A popular portrait of the legendary figure from the American Old West draws on the newspapers and folklore of his lifetime to reveal how he used his humble origins to win three elections as a congressman, in an account that also describes his meager education, presidential nomination, and death at the Alamo. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Buddy Levy is a journalist who has covered adventure sports and lifestyles around the world. He is assistant clinical professor of English at Washington State University.

From Publishers Weekly

Levy presents a sympathetic but unremarkable biography of the legendary frontiersman in colloquial if occasionally florid prose (an election loss "burned into Crockett like a brand searing a cow's flank"). Those whose image of Crockett was formed by the cultishly successful Disney treatment will find much that is familiar: the Indian fighter with Andrew Jackson, the congressmen from Tennessee and, finally, the Texas patriot who died defending the Alamo. But Levy (Echoes on Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge) offers more (although not a lot more) in the way of background and complexity, and is willing to expose some of Crockett's deficiencies without making judgments: Crockett clearly indulged his wanderlust at the expense of his wife, a strong figure in her own right, and was, for a variety of reasons, an ineffective, bumbling politician. But despite his faults, readers will find Crockett likable and talented. In Levy's view, Crockett's abilities were expansive, and he opines that Crockett's bestselling 1834 autobiography "prefigures by some fifty years the literary genre of 'realism,' with nothing remotely like it" until Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And Crockett's falling out with President Jackson over, in part, Jackson's brutal Indian Removal Act of 1830 is to the frontiersman's credit. B&w illus. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley Trade
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0425210081
• ISBN 13: 9780425210086
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352