New Books In Literature

The Wild West of Zane Grey and John Wayne movies, with its clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians (never called Native Americans in this narrative), bears little resemblance to the brawling, boozy refuge for every Civil War-displaced vagabond, seeker of gold (copper, tin, silver, oil), and would-be financier that once constituted the US frontier. In two novels about Doc Holliday and his friends the Earps, Mary Doria Russell pulls back the curtain to reveal the social, economic, and political divides that in the 1870s and 1880s kept the land beyond the Mississippi a hotbed of lawlessness and vice mixed with occasional acts of heroism. Doc begins the story in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1878. Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (Ecco Books, 2015) continues it a few years later in the Arizona Territory, focusing on the events leading up to and the aftermath of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Tombstone, Arizona, is an example of everything right and wrong on the frontier. The silver mines