First published in 1926, this entertaining and dramatic biography forever installed outlaw Billy the Kid in the pantheon of mythic heroes from the Old West and is still considered the single most influential portrait of Billy in this century. Saga focuses on the Kid's life and experiences in the bloody war between the Murphy-Dolan and Tunstall-McSween gangs in and around Lincoln, New Mexico, between 1878 and 1881. Burns paints the Kid as a boyish Robin Hood or romantic knight galvanized into a life of crime and killing by the war's violence and bloodshed. Billy represented the...

First published in 1927, Tombstone defined the legend of lawman-gunfighter Wyatt Earp. A mixture of fact and fiction, Walter Noble Burns's portrayal of Earp has profoundly influenced subsequent generations of historians, novelists, and screen writers. Born in 1849, Earp grew up on the Missouri-Kansas frontier and first came to notice as a no-nonsense town marshal in rip-roaring Dodge City, Kansas. Moving to wide-open Tombstone, Arizona in 1879, he became a businessman and deputy United States marshal where he was soon joined by his four brothers. In Burns's narrative, the Earp clan...