Billy the Kid
Michael Wallis · 2007 · 320 pages
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About this book
History has treated Billy the Kid like a homicidal psychopath, a brazen madman responsible for as many as 21 murders. Steeped in legend, shrouded in folklore and outright lies, Billy the Kid has been portrayed for over 125 years as one of the most savage killers in American folklore. Yet for others, particularly the Hispanic people of the Southwest, the Kid was an avenging angel and a sagebrush Robin Hood. For them and many others, the Kid embodied youth, nobility, humanity, romance, and tragedy. He was the symbolic transition between the old and the new, with a blazing sixgun in hand. Now along comes Michael Wallis's sympathetic yet completely authoritative biography, which challenges and debunks many of the myths that have hounded this young man since his death at the age of 21 in New Mexico Territory. By scrupulously retelling Billy the Kid's brief but compelling story in an effort to set the record straight,Wallis -- renowned for his social histories of the West -- has created a new portrait of this outlaw. Countless books have been published about the Lincoln County War, including Billy the Kid's role in that conflict and the aftermath, but few authors have analyzed the Kid's crimes in the larger context of the political and social corruption that had become a way of life in New Mexico Territory. Wallis describes how the outlaw legend was deliberately manufactured and manipulated -- in fact, really the kid only became known by that name in the last year of his life. Furt
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