Walter Noble Burns

Walter Noble Burns (October 24, 1866 – April 15, 1932) was a writer of Western history. He was notable for his books, especially his best-selling, The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926). Burns' books helped create the legends and perpetuate the fame of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquin Murietta. Biographer Dworkin called him "America's premier romantic outlaw lawman mythmaker."

Life

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 County, Kentucky. Noble was an attorney from Maine, who had migrated to Kentucky, and became a prominent attorney & judge.

His father has financial problems and was unable to send Walter to college. Burns worked as a newspaper reporter for the Louisville Post from 1887 to 1890. He moved west to San Francisco in 1890 and spent a year working on a whaling ship. While living in California, he became a reporter for several eastern newspapers. In 1898 he served with the 1st Kentucky Infantry during the Spanish American War. Settling in Chicago in 1900, Burns resumed his journalism career, becoming a prominent literary critic and crime reporter. He married Rose Marie Hoke on November 10, 1902.