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American Mythmaker - Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquin Murrieta (Hardcover)
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American Mythmaker - Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquin Murrieta (Hardcover)
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Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquin Murrieta are fixed in the
American imagination as towering legends of the Old West. But that
has not always been the case. There was a time when these men were
largely forgotten relics of a bygone era. Then, in the early
twentieth century, an obscure Chicago newspaperman changed all
that. Walter Noble Burns (1872-1932) served with the First Kentucky
Infantry during the Spanish-American War and covered General John
J. Pershing's pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico as a correspondent
for the Chicago Tribune. However history-making these forays may
seem, they were only the beginning. In the last six years of his
life, Burns wrote three books that propelled New Mexico outlaw
Billy the Kid, Tombstone marshal Wyatt Earp, and California bandit
Joaquin Murrieta into the realm of legend. Despite Burns's
remarkable command of his subjects - based on exhaustive research
and interviews - he has been largely ignored by scholars because of
the popular, even occasionally fictional, approach he employed. In
American Mythmaker, the first literary biography of Burns, Mark J.
Dworkin brings Burns out of the shadows. Through careful analysis
of The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926), Tombstone: An Iliad of the
Southwest (1927), and The Robin Hood of Eldorado: The Saga of
Joaquin Murrieta (1932) and their reception, Dworkin shows how
Burns used his journalistic training to introduce the history of
the American West to his era's general readership. In the process,
Burns made his subjects household names. Are Burns's books fact or
fiction? Was he a historian or a novelist? Dworkin considers these
questions as he uncovers the story behind Burns's mythmaking works.
A long-overdue biography of a writer who shaped our idea of western
history, American Mythmaker documents in fascinating detail the
fashioning of some of the greatest American legends.
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