I haven’t started on a book for Billy the Kid yet, but I have found a website that has a good review for one of the books that seperates some of things known about Billy between fact and fiction. The website I found this information on is http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.php?id=26215
One of the books that is mentioned on this website that I’m hoping I will be able to find is To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West by Mark Lee Gardner. It is a dual biography of both Billy the Kid and Pat Garret, the person who shot Billy the Kid. Like with many of the other Americans that we have studied, there are many things that Gardner has said that can start a heated debate with other Billy the Kid scholars and “Billy buffs”. I’m really looking forward to being able to read that book and see what differences there are between the book and some of the other things that I have found. There are many books listed in the article that seem interesting, but of course I won’t be able to read them all. I would like to read Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life since I did find parts of that book in Google books and I was able to get information from it.
I also found another book that was mentioned in this website and another website that I stumbled upon. The other website is http://discovere.binghamton.edu/features/acclaimed-novel-traces-life-of-billy-the-kid-1067.html. The name of the book mentioned in both of these websites is Lucky Billy by Houghton Mifflin. According to the reviews, the book is written so that it feels like you are in the story with the characters. He shows all of Billy’s jail breaks, revenge killings, gun fights, lucky get aways, and his not so lucky death. His death is told from Sheriff Pat Garrett’s point of view, which I find to be very interesting. And this book was also made geared towards the goal of seperating fact and fiction so I’m really excited to read this book to see how it is different from the other two books and the things that I have already read.
I really want to be able to get through the readings of all three of these books and see if I can find an critic’s essays on them. It would be really interesting to know why Billy the Kid is still such a big character in history and what made him important to have all these stories made up about him to the point that we have to seperate fact from legend.