In Dragging Wyatt Earp essayist Robert Rebein explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and ultimately return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City, Kansas. In chapters ranging from memoir to reportage to revisionist history, Rebein contrasts his hometown’s Old West heritage with a New West reality that includes salvage yards, beefpacking plants, and bored teenagers cruising up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard.

Along the way, Rebein covers a vast expanse of place and time and revisits a number of Western myths, including those surrounding Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, George Armstrong Custer, and of course Wyatt Earp himself. Rebein rides a bronc in a rodeo, spends a day as a pen rider at a local feedlot, and attempts to “buck the tiger” at Dodge City’s new Boot Hill Casino and Resort.

Funny and incisive, Dragging Wyatt Earp is an exciting new entry in what is sometimes called the nonfiction of place. It is a must- read for anyone interested in Western history, contemporary memoir, or the collision of Old and New West on the High Plains of Kansas.

Robert Rebein grew up in Dodge City, Kansas, where his family has farmed andranched since the late 1920s. A graduate of the Universityof Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis, as wellas England’s Exeter University, Rebein teaches creative writing and directs the graduate program in English at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis.

In addition to Dragging Wyatt Earp, he is the author of Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists, a study of the role of place in contemporary American fiction.

He lives in Irvington, on the east side of Indianapolis, Indiana, with his wife, Alyssa Chase, and their two children, Ria and Jake.