Wyatt Earp is one of America’s most famous vigilantes who delivered justice the American way—except it’s all a lie. Biographer Andrew Isenberg on how Earp built this myth and its dangerous echoes through American history. — The Daily Beast
Eighty-five years ago in Los Angeles, the western lawman Wyatt Earp, who participated in an infamous gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, met with an aspiring screenwriter, Stuart Lake, and began to dictate his memoirs. Four years later, Lake sold the screen rights to Earp’s story to Fox, and the first of what would be dozens of Earp films went into production. …