Wyatt Erp - Earp's Story

Earp's Story

Earp was dismayed about the controversy that continually followed him. He wrote a letter to John Hays Hammond on May 21, 1925, telling him "notoriety had been the bane of my life". Finally attempting to counter negative accounts in newspapers and books, Earp tried to persuade his good friend, well-known cowboy movie star William S. Hart, to make a movie about his life. "If the story were exploited on the screen by you," he wrote Hart, "It would do much toward setting me right before a public which has always been fed lies about me." Hart encouraged Earp to first find an author to pen his story. Starting in 1925 Earp worked with his personal secretary, the former mining engineer John H. Flood, Jr. to get his life story committed to paper.

In February 1926, Hart encouraged The Saturday Evening Post to publish Flood's biography so "that... the rising generation may know the real from the unreal", but Flood was a horrendous writer, and publisher after publisher rejected the manuscript.