Review

Wallis’ examination of the man behind the myth is both well written and engrossing. (_Booklist_ )

Michael Wallis is the master frontier story teller, having chronicled everything from Billy the Kid to Highway 66. Now he’s told the tale of the real David Crockett as distinguished from the mostly mythical one. Davy (with a show biz “y”) Crockett did, in fact, die at The Alamo but he did not kill a bear when he was only three or wear a coonskin cap except in publicity photographs. That’s just for starters. But the truth has a way of being more interesting than the made-up, most particularly when in the talented writing mind and hands of Michael Wallis. (Jim Lehrer )

Like Crockett himself [Wallis] is a storyteller. The man who emerges from these pages is vivid, comprehensible, and, in the main, historically reliable. On a subject that has come to be dominated by acrimonious debate and posturing, such serenity has a lot to recommend it. (_Texas Monthly_ )

Product Description

Steeped in legend, shrouded in folklore, the real David Crockett, American frontiersman and cultural icon, finally emerges in this engrossing biography.

His name was David Crockett. He never signed his name any other way, but popular culture transformed his memory into "Davy Crockett," and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. Best-selling historian Michael Wallis casts a fresh look at the frontiersman, storyteller, and politician behind these legendary stories. Born into a humble Tennessee family in 1786, Crockett never "killed him a b'ar" when he was only three. But he did cut a huge swath across early-nineteenth-century America—as a bear hunter, a frontier explorer, a soldier serving under Andrew Jackson, an unlikely congressman, and, finally, a martyr in his now-controversial death at the Alamo. Wallis's David Crockett is more than a riveting story. It is a revelatory, authoritative biography that separates fact from fiction, providing us with an extraordinary evocation of a true American hero and the rough-and-tumble times in which he lived. 60 black-and-white illustrations