The Hollywood Cowboys: 3rd. edition

The Hollywood Cowboys
A Creative Nonfiction Epic of Wyatt Earp, Silent Film Legends, and the Final Days of the American West
“Truth never rides alone.”
The Hollywood Cowboys is a sweeping, emotionally charged historical novel set in 1920s Los Angeles, where the frontier is fading, the movie industry is booming, and Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman of the Old West, finds himself advising Hollywood studios on how to make the West “real.” But what they want isn’t the truth. They want legends.
As silent film star William S. Hart dramatizes Wyatt’s life for the screen, Earp wrestles with the rising tide of fiction that threatens to bury who he truly was. By his side is Josephine Marcus Earp, the fiercely loyal and glamorous woman who followed him from Tombstone to Alaska, to the Mojave—and now, to the hills above Hollywood. Their bond, forged in gun smoke and shadowed pasts, is the heart of this evocative love story.

Set between the dusty back alleys of Tombstone and the smoky backlots of early Hollywood, this cinematic narrative follows an aging Earp as he consults on cowboy films, befriends legendary actors William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and a young John Wayne, and Director John Ford. He contends with the legends spun around his name by mythmakers like Stuart N. Lake.
From dusty movie sets and orange blossom-scented backlots to the haunted shafts of a forgotten desert mine, The Hollywood Cowboys explores:
✓ The real man behind the myth of Wyatt Earp
✓ A poignant, enduring romance tested by time, regret, and reinvention
✓ The collision of fact and fiction during the rise of Hollywood’s golden era
✓ Atmospheric scenes, vivid period details, and moral tension steeped in American history
With the lyricism of a literary novel and the grit of a classic Western, this book will resonate with fans of Taylor Sheridan, Mary Doria Russell (Doc), and Kristin Hannah.
“If they rewrite your story, make damn sure it’s not your soul they change.”
At the center stands Josephine Marcus Earp, fiercely devoted and unrelenting, battling to protect her husband’s legacy—and her own place in it. Her voice echoes through history in the memoir I Married Wyatt Earp, a love letter and a declaration of war against those who rewrote her life in footnotes.

Told with snappy, period-accurate dialogue and steeped in the gritty textures of mining dust, studio lights, and aged frontier leather, The Hollywood Cowboys is a deeply emotional tribute to a vanishing world—and the people who refused to be forgotten.

This is a work of creative nonfiction. All major events and figures are based on real people and documented history, woven with dramatized dialogue and reconstructed scenes for narrative impact.


Perfect for readers of:

• Doc and Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell
• The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
• Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne
• Lovers of classic Westerns and American mythmaking