From the bestselling author of The Big Rich and Forget the Alamo comes a reconsideration of Texas as the epicenter of the Wild West, home to America’s most legendary gunfighters including Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch, and Sundance. Join Bryan Burrough and historian Douglas Brinkley for a discussion of the Lone Star State and “one of the most important books written on the American West in many years.” (True West Magazine)

Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. There, the Colt revolver first caught on, and Southern dueling culture took hold. The collapse of the Confederacy and the explosion in the cattle business pushed this unique Texas spirit across the West to create a wild world of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen. With them, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning, and it never stopped. Is the history of Texas and its shooters fact or fiction? The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. Burrough knits history together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. In this evening of presentation and discussion with Douglas Brinkley, we’ll learn why understanding of the Wild West is critical to understanding the American story.

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.

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He works in many capacities in the world of public history. Six of his books were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” and seven became New York Times bestsellers. His most recent book is Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening.