Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The
Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly
detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the
story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to
Tombstone, Arizona, and to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media.
A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare
along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground
and take law into their own hands. . . .
That was America in 1881.
All those forces came to bear on the afternoon of October 26 when Doc
Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the
McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor
arrest. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three officers were
wounded and three citizens lay dead in the dirt.
Wyatt Earp was the last man standing, the only one unscathed. The lies
began before the smoke cleared, but the gunfight at the O.K. Corral
would soon become central to American beliefs about the Old West.
Epitaph tells Wyatt's real story, unearthing the Homeric tragedy
buried under 130 years of mythology, misrepresentation, and sheer
indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, this novel gives voice to the
real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal
thirty seconds in Tombstone. At its heart is the woman behind the myth:
Josephine Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for forty-nine years and
who carefully chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic
legend that would become the epitaph her husband deserved.
