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Hopelessly Devoted to You
| Article
# : |
15795 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
4,433 Words |
| Author
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Stephen Tatum
Stephen Tatum teaches American literature and American Studies
at the University of Utah. He is the author of Inventing Billy
the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881-1981. |
When the unarmed Henry McCarty--alias William H. Bonney and Billy the Kid--was killed by Pat Garrett in Pete Maxwell's bedroom on the night of July 14, 1881, the youthful outlaw had killed four men and participated in the killing of five others during his travels in New Mexico and Arizona after a boyhood spent in New York City, Indianapolis, Wichita, and Colorado. Newspapers in territorial New Mexico congratulated Garrett for his achievement in ending the Kid's bloody reign of terror, and one commentator hoped that the Kid would have the good sense to cooperate and be good enough to "stay dead."
Yet as we know full well now, over a century after the Kid's death, the gaps in our knowledge of his biography, the mystery surrounding his decision not to head for Mexico after his dramatic jailbreak in early 1881, and the controversies engendered by Garrett's summary justice have provided dramatic narrative opportunities for the creative imaginations of numerous novelists, short-story writers, playwrights, journalists, historians, and filmmakers. The bibliography of items devoted to Billy the Kid's legendary life and death now contains around one thousand references, a figure that supports the widely held notion that the Kid represents one of the West's two most significant contributions to American mythology (Custer is the other).
McMurtry's Postmodern Billy
Interest in the Kid has ebbed in the wake of the 1981 centennial celebration of his passing, but in the past year two new historical interpretations of the Lincoln Country war that spawned the Billy the Kid legend have been published (Robert Utley's Violence in Lincoln County and John
... (1997 of 25847 Characters)
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