The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his new book "The Gunfighters," there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.
Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of seven books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic "Barbarians at the Gate" and, most recently, "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth." A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin.
