Stuart N. Lake (September 23, 1889, Rome, New York – January 27, 1964, San Diego, California) was a writer whose material dealt largely with the American Old West. He is most well known as the author of Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, a 1931 biography of Wyatt Earp (later found to be largely fictional) that served as the basis for several movies, including Frontier Marshal starring Randolph Scott, and John Ford's My Darling Clementine, as well as the 1955 to 1961 television series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He also wrote for other motion pictures including The Westerner and Winchester '73 starring James Stewart.
Before becoming a writer, he had been a professional wrestling promoter, a press aide to Theodore Roosevelt during the Bull Moose campaign, and then been run over by a truck in World War I. He is the first writer to describe Wyatt Earp's use of the Colt Buntline, although later researchers have not been able to establish that Earp ever owned a weapon like that.
Famous quotes containing the words stuart and/or lake:
“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)