John Flood and Wyatt Earp

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Surely you’ve heard authors bemoan getting enough rejection slips from publishers to paper a room. But what if the author were the famed frontier lawman Wyatt Earp, and the man sending his book-length autobiography around was Western silent film idol William S. Hart?

From about 1925 until Earp’s death in 1929, that pair of American legends time and again got stinging publisher reactions like these: “We have been unable to find a place for it in the Saturday Evening Post ”; “I am deeply disappointed….The writing is stilted, florid and diffuse”; “We do not care particularly for the style in which it is written.”

Earp left Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in 1882, following the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its dramatic aftermath. He spent his remaining nearly 50 years suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stemming from bad press. In his eyes, more often than not, the lionizing was overdone. Conversely, he was haunted by the untruths allegedly concocted by his many enemies.

Still, Earp generally reacted to the rejections of his autobiography with diplomacy. The one who sputtered most over the book’s poor reception was Hart. The two had become closely acquainted soon after World War I.

For years after Wyatt Earp’s marriage, common law or otherwise, to Josephine Marcus, one-time girlfriend of Earp’s archenemy in Tombstone, Sheriff Johnny Behan, the childless but always devoted Earps traveled and lived in Alaska and elsewhere in the West. They ultimately settled in Los Angeles.

A scandalous article about his lawman life by J.M. Scanland in the March 12, 1922 , Sunday Los Angeles Times apparently tipped the scales for Earp, who’d had enough of being raked over the coals. Something had to be done to set things right. Josephine fumed about it in a March 24 letter to Hart. More than a year later, on July 7, 1923 , Earp wrote the famous Western actor that a Hart movie about him might once and for all establish the truth about the Earp legend. As late as April 1925, Wyatt still had it on his mind.

By this time Earp had a personal secretary, John H. Flood, Jr., and he put Flood to work committing his life story to typewritten page. Earp contacted Hart about looking over the manuscript Flood was working on. “I am tired of seeing so many articles published concerning me which are untrue,” wrote Earp.

Endorsing the effort in early 1926, Hart sent Flood’s manuscript to the Saturday Evening Post for possible serialization, and the string of rejection letters began. A bit later, Walter Noble Burns, a man who was to become famous in furthering the Earp legend for better or worse, visited the aging lawman about doing a biography. Earp declined, saying the Flood book was done and he had high hopes for it. Hart learned of the visit and further cautioned Earp on September 9, 1926, “But my dear friend, Wyatt Earp, it [Burns' Saga of Billy the Kid ] was copped in many instances word for word from a story published many years ago by Charlie Siringo called The Life of Billy the Kid .”

Names that were to become literary legends showed up on some of the rejection letters. One, signed “T.B. Costain,” the later famous author Thomas B. Costain (1885-1965), dictated the Saturday Evening Post ’s gloomy verdict. The Thomas Y. Crowell company’s dismal sign-off with the initials “T.Y.C.” suggested that he book had “a trifle too much gunplay in it for the average reader….There is too much straining for effect….We are reluctantly declining the book.” The former lawman didn’t let his disappointment show when he wrote Hart in December 1926, “Whatever the outcome, I shall not be discouraged.”

Hart also tried Houghton Mifflin—the house that soon after published Hart’s autobiography and would ultimately produce Stuart N. Lake’s Earp biography after Earp’s death. The Earp autobiography came back with a thanks but no thanks. Hart was not pleased. “I cannot see what is the matter with them,” Hart wrote Earp. “It may be some literacy defect they can see which is beyond our vision. However, I am hammering at them until the hot places freeze over.”

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