{"product_id":"wyatt-earp-a-vigilante-life","title":"Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eFinalist for the 2014 Weber-Clements Book Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America  In popular culture  Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone  Arizona  and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films  he has been invoked in battles against organized crime (in the 1930s)  communism (in the 1950s)  and al-Qaeda (after 2001). Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life  the Hollywood Earp is largely a fictionone created by none other than Earp himself. The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality  Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasnt wearing a badge  he was variously a thief  a brothel bouncer  a gambler  and a confidence man. As Isenberg writes  \"He donned and shucked off roles readily  whipsawing between lawman and lawbreaker  and pursued his changing ambitions recklessly  with little thought to the cost to himself  and still less thought to the cost  even the deadly cost  to others.\" By 1900  Earps misdeeds had caught up with him: his involvement as a referee in a fixed heavyweight prizefight brought him national notoriety as a scoundrel. Stung by the press  Earp set out to rebuild his reputation. He spent his last decades in Los Angeles  where he befriended Western silent film actors and directors. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself  in the end he invented a better past. Isenberg argues that even though Earp  who died in 1929  did not live to see it  Hollywoods embrace of him as a paragon of law and order was his greatest confidence game of all. A searching account of the man and his enduring legend  and a book about our national fascination with extrajudicial violence  Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life is a resounding biography of a singular American figure.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44946496159797,"sku":"ByrdShop_0809095009","price":28.54,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780809095001.jpg?v=1769952750","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/wyatt-earp-a-vigilante-life","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}