The Saga of Billy the Kid

Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. Book Club (BCE/BOMC). Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 8x5x1. Book club edition ('Book of the Month Club Selection' on spine). Spine a bit faded, boards lightly rubbed/soiled. 1926 Hard Cover. 322 pp. Six-Guns and Saddle Leather 337: "This romantic piece of folklore has been mistaken for fact by many and has remained so popular that it has been kept in print in both this country and in England." "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 romantic and anarchic Old West that the march of civilization was rapidly displacing. His destroyer was Pat Garrett, the courageous sheriff of Lincoln County. Garrett's shooting of Billy in 1881 hastened the closing of the American frontier. Walter Noble Burns's Saga of Billy the Kid kindled a fascination in Billy the Kid that survives to this day. Richard W. Etulain's foreword discusses the singular importance of Saga in the historical literature on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War.