Bucking the tiger

the long version

"John Henry "Doc" Holliday, icon of the American West, was diagnosed with consumption in 1873 and given six months to live. Instead, over the next fifteen years, this Ivy League-educated dentist from a genteel Georgia family flirted with danger on America's far frontier as he ingeniously improvised ways in which a man might bluff death - and attain a measure of immortality.". "Bucking the Tiger illuminates the life of Doc Holliday in a fluid, genre-blurring collage of reconstituted news accounts, original poems, adulterated epigraphs, simulated eyewitness testimony, fictionalized memoir, invented correspondence, and reimagined folk history. Holliday's checkered careers as frontier dentist, itinerant saloon gambler, and professional faro dealer, and his role in such incidents as the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral, spawned the enduring legend of a soulless killer. But as ferocious as Holliday could be when aroused, he was no less passionate in his pursuit of the idea of love, an idea embodied for him in the voluptuous, free-spirited prostitute Kate Elder. Their turbulent, unorthodox love affair is evoked in a haunting, occasionally brutal kaleidoscope of images and accounts that penetrates to the heart of the man indentured to his myth."--BOOK JACKET.