
Wyatt Earp
A Vigilante Life
Andrew C. Isenberg(Author)
Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S. (Publisher)
Published on 8. July 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-8090-9869-9 (ISBN)
Description
As Andrew C. Isenberg shows in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction created by Earp himself, whose life was characterized not by an unflinching devotion to law and order but by inconstancy, defiance of authority, and repeated self-invention. The Earp played on - screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive law-breaking and shifting identities. When he wasn't wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man. He spent his last decades in Los Angeles, where his plastic identity and his penchant for reinvention freely lent themselves to Hollywood mythmaking. Befriending Western silent-film actors and directors, he presented himself to them as a lawman singularly committed to justice. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself, in the end Earp invented a better past. Though Earp, who died in 1929, did not live to see it, Hollywood's embrace of him as a paragon of law and order was his last and undoubtedly greatest confidence game.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 143 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
455 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8090-9869-9 (9780809098699)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Andrew C. Isenberg