Doc Holliday
The Life and Legend
1. Auflage August 2007
544 Seiten, Softcover
Sachbuch
Kurzbeschreibung
He was a dentist from the South believed to have gone west because of tuberculosis, a man who went on to become a gambler, a faro dealer, and one of the most feared (and fearless) gunfighters of his time--a close friend of Wyatt Earp and a key participant in the famous 1881 shootout at the OK Corral. He's been portrayed on screen by actors ranging from Victor Mature and Kirk Douglas to Dennis Quaid and Val Kilmer. But who was the real Doc Holliday? Drawing on 20 years of meticulous, primary-source research, Western historian Gary Roberts strips away the legends and reveals the truth about this enigmatic man, offering many new and surprising discoveries.
"You can't beat this story for drama. . . . An omnibus of everything ever known, spoken, or written about Doc Holliday."
-Publishers Weekly
"An engagingly written, persuasively argued, solidly documented work of scholarship that will surely take its place in the literature of the Old West."
-Booklist
In Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend, the historian Gary Roberts takes aim at the most complex, perplexing, and paradoxical gunfighter of the Old West, drawing on more than twenty years of research-including new primary sources-in his quest to separate the life from the legend. Doc Holliday was a study in contrasts: the legendary gunslinger who made his living as a dentist; the emaciated consumptive whose very name struck fear in the hearts of his enemies; the degenerate gambler and alcoholic whose fierce loyalty to his friends compelled him, more than once, to risk his own life; and the sidekick whose near-mythic status rivals that of the West's greatest heroes. With lively details of Holliday's spirited exploits, his relationships with such Western icons as Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, this book sheds new light on one of the most mysterious figures of frontier history.
Prologue: The Measure of a Man.
1 Child of the Southern Frontier.
2 The World Turned Upside Down.
3 Gone to Texas.
4 Cow Towns and Pueblos.
5 The Price of a Reputation.
6 Friends and Enemies.
7 The Fremont Street Fiasco.
8 Vengeance.
9 The Out Trail.
10 A Holliday in Denver.
11 A Living--and Dying--Legend.
12 The Anatomy of a Western Legend.
Epilogue: The Measure of a Legend.
Notes.
Index.
