This edition, complete with the original text, provides an introduction that reappraises the last fatal meeting of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. Frederick Nolan shows how the Garrett's book is responsible for misconceptions about the Kid's early life and his short, violent career.

When Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett ended Billy the Kids life on the night of July 14, 1881, with a shot in the dark, he was catapulted at once into stardom in the annals of Western history. This edition is a facsimile of the 1927 text that Garrett wrote to counteract the negative image he gained after the shooting.

This tour de force of western scholarship, a revised and expanded version of Tuska's Billy the Kid: A Bio-Bibliography, adds ten year's worth of scholarship to the earlier effort. Tuska provides a carefully documented biography of the Kid; bibliographical essays on historical scholarship, fiction, films, and cultural criticism; and a chronology of his life and death. Tuska's careful scholarship and analysis of sources refutes the mythical embellishments that have surrounded Billy the Kid. He concludes that in order for such a legend to arise, it is necessary for a historical character to have qualities that permit ambiguous interpretations of his behavior. "A model for others who would study legendary heroes of the American West". -- Choice "Anyone interested in Western outlaws will find this handsomely illustrated volume indispensable". -- Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Examines the career of the young outlaw whose life and death were an expression of the violence prevalent on the American frontier.

Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss's son. In relating Billy's fall from the underworld grace and his storybook redemption, Kennedy captures the seamy underside of a brassy, sweaty city that would prefer to pretend that the Depression doesn't exist.