Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends

Tells the entire story of Earp's amazing life, explaining why he became a legend among his contemporaries and how Hollywood reinvented him first as a hero and then as a scoundrel. 30,000 first printing.

Wall Street Journal sportswriter Barra (That's Not the Way It Was) does an admirable job of discounting the stories and outright lies told by Earp's contemporaries by using firsthand accounts and newspaper stories of the time. Barra concludes that the legend we know as Wyatt Earp is really a compilation of many of the characters who frequented the streets, barrooms and card games of the Wild West. But most scholars agree that Earp was intelligent, strong and generally a just lawman. A particularly interesting section concentrates on the shoot-out at the OK Corral and the subsequent trial and lasting animosity between Earp and his associates?his brothers and Doc Holliday?and the gang of "cowboys" who forever harassed them. Barra also chronicles Earp's romantic interests, including his and marriage to Josephine Sarah Marcus, a Jewish actress from New York. Barra's writing alternates, somewhat awkwardly, between a rather folksy tone and some academic detail, but readers who grew up with the legend of Wyatt Earp, both in literature and in film, will be intrigued by Barra's comprehensive and detailed dismantling of the popular myths surrounding this figure.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A worthy attempt to prospect for facts amid the mists of myth and partisan hearsay long clouding the story of gambler and frontier marshal Earp, his brothers, friends, and foes, especially in the silver mining camp of Tombstone, Ariz. Barra, a Wall Street Journal sports columnist, finds Civil War passions lingering on as northern Republicans went west to establish business communities and dig for precious metals. They were looked upon by many cowboys and ranch owners from the recently vanquished South as Yankees, including the Earp brothers (from Illinois) and their friendse.g., fiery, Georgia-born dead-shot dentist Doc Holliday, who joined the band of lawmen that tamed wild cow towns like Wichita and Dodge City before arriving in Tombstone itself. The entire frontier was a demimonde, Barra notes. He describes Tombstone as a place controlled by those whod grown affluent through big-time cattle rustling and stage coach robberies (while approving a puppet sheriff and the local press). The outnumbered Earps and their allies met with their greatest challenge when confronting their entrenched opponents in that famed gunfight at the OK Corral; three of the outlaw ranchers were killed. The Earps were then made signal entries on the hit lists of their enemies, who bought the local press and used it to spread the notion that the Earps were rustlers and robbers. Barra cuts through most of the lies and lore, aided by his own research and the studies of credible historians (Utley and Nolan), to finally rate Earp as strong, brave, honorable, intelligenta loyal friend and a peacekeaeper, rather than just another compulsive gunfighter. In fact, he lived as a lawman on the frontier for only six years. His wife of nearly half a century, the Jewish actress Josephine Marcus, shared his later adventures in Hollywood and elsewhere. A thorough documentary revision of the Western genres customary fantasy. (16 pages color and b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Western is a genre that seems eternal. Wyatt Earp, the hero or villain of the OK Corral affair, depending on whose book you read or film you see, is a figure of seemingly unending interest. Following Stuart Lake's 1931 classic Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal and Casey Tefertiller's fine Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (LJ 12/97), Barra (Wall Street Journal sports columnist and author) has written an intriguing biographical and historical study of the legend of Wyatt Earp as it occurs in text and film. Barra sees Earp as very much a hero?but not for the familiar reasons offered by his mythologizers, who have often reduced the complexity of the man. A well-written and carefully documented book; highly recommended for popular biography and Western history collections.?Charles V. Cowling, Drake Memorial Lib., Brockport, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.