Everyone's heard the story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral. It's been immortalized in over 40 feature films and written about in 1,000 books.
The newest book on the tale, however, refuses to accept the story as we know it. Mary Doria Russell's new novel digs for truth in the conflict that made Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday household names.
While researching "Epitaph," Russell tracked down diaries, census records and first-hand accounts of the O.K. Corral shootout. "It has been simplified and scrubbed up and changed and ultimately you have fiction based on fiction based on fiction," Russell said on MPR News' Kerri Miller. "What I was trying to do was get back to the real people, peel away the mythology, find the core of historical truth and work with that instead of just accepting the way it had been portrayed in movies for years."
