{"product_id":"american-mythmaker-walter-noble-burns-and-the-legends-of-billy-the-kid-wyatt-earp-and-joaqun-murrieta-9780806146850","title":"American Mythmaker: Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid  Wyatt Earp  and Joaqun Murrieta","description":"\u003cp\u003eBilly the Kid  Wyatt Earp  and Joaqun 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 (18721932) served with the First Kentucky Infantry during the Spanish-American War and covered General John J. Pershings 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 Joaqun Murrieta into the realm of legend.  Despite Burnss remarkable command of his subjectsbased on exhaustive research and interviewshe 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 Joaqun Murrieta (1932) and their reception  Dworkin shows how Burns used his journalistic training to introduce the history of the American West to his eras general readership. In the process  Burns made his subjects household names.  Are Burnss books fact or fiction? Was he a historian or a novelist? Dworkin considers these questions as he uncovers the story behind Burnss 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45665929822261,"sku":"ByrdShop_0806146850","price":60.88,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780806146850.jpg?v=1782414567","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/american-mythmaker-walter-noble-burns-and-the-legends-of-billy-the-kid-wyatt-earp-and-joaqun-murrieta-9780806146850","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}