cover image Gunfighter

Gunfighter

John Wesley Hardin. Creation Books, $13.95 (127pp) ISBN 978-1-84068-038-6

Son of a Methodist preacher, John Wesley Hardin killed a man at age 15, thus beginning a murderous, fugitive existence. He was eventually caught, and during his 16 years in jail studied law. After his release, he set up a law practice, but soon returned to gambling and drinking. By the time of his death at the age of 42, he was killed in a barroom brawl he was loathed as a murderer and loved as a vigilante hero, in equal measure. He also left behind the eerily captivating Gunfighter, the only literate, first-person account of an outlaw that has emerged from the late 19th-century West. This edition is the first since 1961; few cultural historians of the period will want to be without it. ( May)