Born to the life of an educated Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given a choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone he loves in hopes of finding health in the West. Young, scared, lonely and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier in time for an economic crash. Soon he's gambling professionally and living with a high-strung, classically educated Hungarian whore who insists that they follow the money to Dodge City. And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and a lawman named Wyatt Earp begins-- before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology --when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety.--Back cover.

A reader's guide includes questions and topics for discussion and a conversation between John Connelly and Mary Doria Russell.