Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends »

Allen Barra is the best-selling author of The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant. His writing appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, Playboy, Interview, and Salon. He lives in South Orange, New Jersey.

In a violent half-minute, in a gunfight near the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp became a legend. He was thirty-three. He died forty-eight years later, in Hollywood, where he worked as an advisor on film westerns. He'd had firsthand experience in the creation of American myth, and in this remarkable volume, Allen Barra illuminates fully the man who strode into our national imagination, as well as the myths that have continually reinvented him in history, film, and fiction.
"Any future arguments will have to reckon with the evidence and explication that Allen Barra presents in this thoughtful, careful book." - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
"Continually surpris[ing] . . . Barra's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious, his eye for human foible compassionate, and his nose for the odd fact irrepressible." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A grand, often fascinating account of a man . . . [and] legend" - Chicago Tribune
"Provide[s] a fascinating glimpse into a rowdy, turbulent period in the nation's history by re-examining one of the legendary figures who made it so" - Cincinnati Enquirer
"Wyatt Earp's hell-for-leather charge into the rugged territory between history and legend has never been better charted." - San Diego Union-Tribune

The New York Times Book Review - Richard E. Nicholls

...[An] engaging, detailed and refreshingly pugnacious book....[Barra] attempts to recover the man behind the tales and to sort out the facts....[He] has done an admirable job of sorting through the many conflicting sources regarding Earp's career and the shootout....Barra offers a Wyatt Earp more complex in his motives [than many biographers depict him], but nonetheless deeply courageous...