Walter Noble Burns

Walter Noble Burns (1866–1932) was a writer of Western history and a Western fiction author. He was notable for his book, The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926).

Family
Burns was born on October 24, 1866, in Lebanon, Kentucky. He was the son of Thomas E. Burns (1837–1908), a colonel in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Walter's mother, Mary Crisella Noble (1847–1871), died when he was four years old. He and his father, Thomas E. Burns, were recorded as resident with his mother's parents, Lorenzo H. Noble (1819–1899) and Alice Ann Noble (1823–1899), during the 1870 and 1880 Federal Censuses in Marion Co., Kentucky. Noble was an attorney from Maine, who had migrated to Kentucky, and became a prominent attorney & judge. Walter married Rose Marie Hoke on 10 November 1902.

Career
Walter Noble Burns served with the 1st Kentucky Infantry during the Spanish–American War in 1898. In 1900, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, and began a career as a journalist, literary critic and crime reporter. After World War I, Burns retired as a reporter, then concentrated his writing about Western American legends.

Publications

 * |A Year With a Whaler, 1913
 * The Saga of Billy the Kid 1926
 * Tombstone: an Iliad of the Southwest 1927
 * The One-way Ride: The red trail of Chicago gangland from prohibition to Jake Lingle 1931
 * The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta, Famous Outlaw of California's Age of Gold 1932

Filmography

 * Billy the Kid , 1930
 * Robin Hood of El Dorado, 1936
 * Billy the Kid , 1941
 * Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die, 1942

Biography
Mark J. Dworkin (1946–2012) compiled a biography about Walter Noble Burns, entitled American Mythmaker: Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta. Dworkin died in 2012, prior to the completion of this book, which was published in 2015 by the University of Oklahoma Press.