Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931) was a best-selling but largely fictional biography of Wyatt Earp written by Stuart N. Lake and published by Houghton Mifflin Company. It was the first biography of Earp, supposedly written with his input. It established the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the public consciousness and concocted a story about Wyatt Earp as a fearless lawman in the American Old West. Earp and his wife Josephine Earp tried to persuade Lake to leave her and Earp's second wife out of the book, even threatening legal action. When the book was published, both were not mentioned.
Lake's story was the basis for at least three movies—Frontier Marshall, made in 1934; Frontier Marshall, made in 1939; and My Darling Clementine, made in 1946—based on the book. The 1955 television series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp was also based on his book and made Lake into one of the first television moguls. A number of writers and researchers have been unable to document many of the stories found in the book and it is now considered "largely fictional".
Read more about Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal: Establishes Earp's Reputation, Book Development, Publication, Film Adaptations
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“Tom Mix: Wyatt, is that really the way it was?
Wyatt Earp: Absolutely. Well, give or take a lie or two.”
—Blake Edwards (b. 1922)
“Blame but thyself that hast misdone,
And well deserved to have blame;
Change thou thy way so evil begun,
And then my lute shall sound that same:
But if till then my fingers play
By thy desert their wonted way,
Blame not my lute.”
—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)
“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.”
—Frederico Fellini (b. 1920)