ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Award Winning Author and Western Historian, Mark Warren, Will Speak at Main Street Books in Davidson on August 10 at 4pm.

Mark Warren’s award winning trilogy “Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey,” from Five Star – Gale Cengage transports the reader back to the 19th century West with a true-to-life portrayal of America’s most legendary lawman.

This trilogy represents the culmination of more than 60 years of research and contains information about Earp’s life not known to the general public. It’s all here: the ambitions and failures of a man who wanted more for himself than police work . . . the decisions of disgrace and the moments of nobility . . . acts of shame and acts of moral pride.

Warren says: “I have written it as close to the truth as I know how. And as usual, the truth is so much more compelling than the myth. Welcome to the real story.”

Was Wyatt Earp the hero that legend has taught us? He was a young man making his way toward some undefined version of financial

success in the hardscrabble terrain of America’s raw frontier. What he achieved came as a complete surprise to him, for he did not crave a life of notoriety based upon his work as a peace officer. Yet, when we look back on his story, it becomes clear that he was meant for this occupation. What he accomplished is not as important as the manner in which he handled himself in a hostile environment. Always direct and with no talent for politics or affectation, Wyatt Earp won the undying respect of those around him. That or their hatred. There seemed to be no middle-ground.

Book One – “Adobe Moon” – It is 1862. With his older brothers fighting in the war, young Wyatt Earp is left to manage the family’s Iowa farm under his father’s iron rule. These years of labor produce in him an ambition to seek his fortunes by his wits rather than by the sweat of his back. The open territory to the west, he knows, offers that opportunity.

After westering to California he meets a beguiling Mexican girl, who tells him of the “adobe moon,” a rusty-hued orb that reminds a man: If

you do not achieve your dreams, you must settle for what you have. Wyatt rejects this idea, but it haunts him, nevertheless, as he tries his hand at coach driving, freight hauling, and railroad work. When he becomes a constable in a small Missouri town, marries, and loses both wife and child to disease, he sinks into a depression where the line of ethics blur. Having temporarily lost his ambitions, he strikes back at the world as a bouncer in a string of brothels.

Fed up with his self-made squalor, he returns to the West for a second chance at a proper life, and in a Kansas cattle town he comes face to face with his salvation…and his destiny as a lawman with his own iron rule.

Book Two – Born to the Badge – In Wichita, Kansas, Wyatt Earp answers his most innate calling and returns to law enforcement, where he excels by sheer force and an utter lack of fear. When town leaders become disenchanted with his hardline methods, he moves to a place where an iron-rule is needed – Dodge City, the new cattle shipping center of the country.

As assistant marshal in Dodge, Wyatt stands at the center of a volatile arena, which pits the mayhem of celebratory, Texas cowboys against the economic security of the merchants. Wyatt’s performance as a proficient officer earns him respect among the citizens, but it does not provide the social standing he desires.

In Texas, he meets a man whose name will be forever linked with his own. Doc Holliday is a testy, Southern ex-dentist-turned-gambler, who is dying from tuberculosis. By giving Wyatt information about the train robbers, Doc offers the first thread in an unlikely friendship that will weave the two men’s lives into a common story that will be told through the ages.

Book Three – Promised Land – (Due for release on October 16, 2019) In Tombstone, Arizona Territory, despite a silver strike promising entrepreneurial opportunities, Wyatt Earp returns to law enforcement, posing a new threat to the rustlers, stage robbers, and murderers running rampant on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Earp brothers make as many enemies as they do allies in a deeply divided community.

Aspiring to be county sheriff, Wyatt bargains with outlaw informants in his pursuit of three wanted men. When the deal unravels, the cowboy traitors fear retribution from their own, planting the seed for the thirty seconds that will ensure Wyatt Earp his place in history–the gunfight that erupts behind the O.K. Corral.

What follows–assassination and swift justice–guarantees that Wyatt Earp’s name will forever be measured within the debate of law versus order.

Reviewer Quotes for Adobe Moon and Born to the Badge:
“It is plain Mark Warren knows Wyatt Earp’s story. He has researched it long enough, deep enough, and well enough to know it in ways that few others do. Adobe Moon is an absorbing read. Understated, direct, yet somehow reflective and even philosophical, it is easy to forget that this is a novel about an American legend. And that makes it all the more satisfying in the end. In the restless ramblings of the young Wyatt Earp, Warren found clues to the man Earp would be. I will be looking forward to the continuing odyssey of the very human Wyatt Earp he is revealing. For now, I have much to ponder as a result of reading Adobe Moon.” ~ Dr. Gary Roberts, Emeritus Professor of History, Abraham Baldwin College, author of “Doc Holliday, the Life and Legend,” Wiley and Sons, 2006.

“Mark Warren is the first writer to illuminate the Earp story from the inside. ‘Adobe Moon’ and ‘Born to the Badge’ show you why Wyatt Earp became a legend and what that legend was born out of.” ~Allen Barra, author of “Inventing Wyatt Earp, his Life and Many Legends.”

“In 1896, Ed Colburn, who had been a Dodge City attorney during that town’s turbulent early years, remembered Wyatt Earp: ‘While there (Dodge City), I saw Wyatt Earp do things you wouldn’t undertake for a million dollars, and yet he did it every day just as a street car conductor rings up fares or a banker receives deposits.’ In ‘Born to the Badge’ Mark Warren follows Earp through the Kansas cow-towns where he first makes a name for himself. They still talk about Wyatt Earp in Wichita and Dodge City. After reading this book, you’ll understand why.” ~Jeff Morey, Historical Consultant for the movie “Tombstone.”

“Not every writer understands that the most important line in any book is the hook – that opening sentence which grabs your attention and makes you eager to read on. ‘Born to the Badge’ opens with the following line: ‘Wichita, Kansas, was hell in the making…’ and there I went – engrossed for hours…Warren is able to convey scenes with a cinematic clarity. In this way, I can see the store room lit by the warm glow of a single lantern; and the prairie crossing at night, guided solely by the stars above and the subtle shapes of the land smudged on a distant horizon” ~Peta Stevalli, New Zealand Booklovers

“Warren’s novel paints a vivid picture of the lawlessness of the American Frontier…Although this book is a fictionalized account, its dedication to facts will keep history buffs satisfied, and its colorful similes will put a smile on any genre-fiction lover’s face.” ~ Booklist

Quote from the Author: “When I was 6 years old I checked out a book from my elementary school library and read the so-called “biography” of Wyatt Earp. The story reached down inside me and gripped me as no story ever had before. Why? Courage has always fascinated me, and whether or not it was courage or lack of fear (two very different ideas) that governed Wyatt Earp’s actions, he had my attention. It would be many years before I would discover that this early Earp book was highly fictionalized. The real story, I learned, was more complicated and much more interesting.”

Author Bio – Mark Warren is a graduate of the University of Georgia with a degree in Chemistry/Pre-med. At Medicine Bow, his school in the Southern Appalachians, he teaches nature classes and survival skills of the Cherokees. The National Wildlife Federation named him Georgia’s Conservation Educator of the Year in 1980. Mark has written extensively about nature and primitive survival for magazines, including: Guernica, Blue Ridge Highlander, North Georgia Journal, Camping, Paddle, Survivor’s Edge, and Georgia Backroads. His published books include: Two Winters in a Tipi (Lyons Press, 2012), a memoir, Secrets of the Forest (Waldenhouse Publishing, 2016), a 4-volume series on nature/survival, Adobe Moon (Five Star Publishing, 2017), a historical novel and first in the trilogy Wyatt Earp: An American Odyssey. Born to the Badge, second in the trilogy (Five Star, 2018) and Promised Land (Five Star, coming in October 2019), the third book in the trilogy.

“Adobe Moon” and “Born to the Badge” are available at Main Street Books in Davidson. Support your local Indie bookstore today!

Check out all of Mark Warren’s books by clicking here.