The Gunfighters - by Bryan Burrough (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Named a Best Book of 2025 by Bloomberg

"One hell of a good read." --The New York Times

"One of the most important books written on the American West in many years." --True West Magazine

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Big Rich and Forget the Alamo comes an epic reconsideration of the time and place that spawned America's most legendary gunfighters, from Jesse James and Billy the Kid to Butch and Sundance

The Wild West gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it as a mere product of dime novels and B movies. As Bryan Burrough shows us, there's much more below the surface. At the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reason behind this boils down to one word: Texas.

Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and presence of northern occupiers turned the heat up further. The explosion in the postwar cattle business took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers,
and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a veritable
blood meridian.

The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair--good, bad, and ugly. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.

Review Quotes

"It is a reminder that we are selective about our heroes. And that American history was made not just by the Founding Fathers but also by the messy rascals and gamblers and liars and killers who have long filled out its more sordid chapters. Our nation has always been shaped by the latter, too, it turns out, and reading about them years after the fact, antiheroes though they may have been, is still a hell of a good time." --The Washington Post

"Engrossing." --The Wall Street Journal

"One of the most important books written on the American West in many years." --True West Magazine

"A captivating exploration of the Wild West, delving into the era of gunfighters with literary flair and historical depth . . . Burrough expertly separates fact from folklore . . . A fascinating work of history that challenges readers to reconsider the role of the West's legendary gunfighters in shaping the identity of the United States." --Library Journal (starred review)

"A treat for Western history buffs who don't mind plenty of debunking along the way." --Kirkus

"The Gunfighters has all the propulsive energy and high tension of a Wild-West yarn. But it has the distinction of being (mostly) true. Burrough takes on the mythic characters of the West with his characteristic wit, thoughtfulness, and eye for the absurd. He tells this story as only a loving--but conflicted--son of Texas could." --Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

"The Gunfighters is a wild and distinctly American book--brilliant, breezy, violent and unexpectedly moving. The book's cast of characters--guys like Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Butch Cassidy--are the mythological superheroes of the old West, men who roamed the hills and prairies at a moment when guns and cattle and lawlessness reigned supreme. Burrough's great accomplishment is not just that he separates historical fact from Hollywood fiction and retells the gunslingers' stories for our time, but that he does it without condemning or romanticizing them--he lets them live in all their blood and savagery and private codes of honor. You can feel the bullets whizzing by on every page." --Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First

"In The Gunfighters, Bryan Burrough takes dead aim at one of America's greatest foundation myths. The result is a blood-spattered narrative that starts with hyperviolent men shooting each other and ends as a transcendent portrait of the Old West." --S.C. Gwynne, author of New York Times bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell

"A harrowing look at the killers who operated on every possible side of the law during a time that has been heedlessly sealed into legend. For anyone who has ever been curious about the real stories behind Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Jesse James or Sam Bass, The Gunfighters is a masterful example of one-stop shopping." --Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

"In The Gunfighters, Bryan Burrough uses his tremendous gifts as a historian and storyteller to revolutionize our understanding of a core part of the American myth. This is riotous history stripped of Hollywood cliches, a fresh take on the violence and the legends that formed the Wild West and the American story itself." --Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk and When the Heavens Went on Sale

About the Author

Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of eight books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic Barbarians at the Gate and Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin.