The New York Times–bestselling biography: an “authoritative and enormously engaging” narrative of the Hollywood icon’s life and career (Peter Bogdanovich, The New York Times Book Review).

One of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Era, John Wayne remains one of today’s most instantly recognizable actors. In this lively and intimate biography, noted film historian Scott Eyman offers the most complete and nuanced portrait of the man behind such iconic roles as Rooster Cogburn, Davy Crockett, The Ringo Kid, and so many others.

“We all think we know John Wayne, in part because he seemed to be playing himself in movie after movie. Yet as Eyman carefully lays out, ‘John Wayne’ was an invention, a persona created layer by layer by an ambitious young actor” This biography reveals how Wayne became the symbol of his country at mid-century, and the quintessential American male against whom other screen heroes are still compared (The Washington Post).

Going beyond Wayne’s storied film career, Eyman delves his stormy marriages, his notorious—and surprisingly long-lived—affair with Marlene Dietrich, and his later days as an anti-Communist conservative. Eyman “gets at the details that the bean-counters and myth-spinners miss . . . Wayne’s intimates have told things here that they’ve never told anyone else” (Los Angeles Times).