American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

Book Overview

The new popular biography of one of America's most enduring symbols of the Old West. David Crockett was an adventurer, a pioneer, and a tragic hero who died at the Alamo. But the life of the real Crockett has been largely obscured and overshadowed by his mythology, turning this honest, unassuming backwoodsman into a larger-than-life, Disney-fied character in a coonskin cap. In his short but distinguished lifetime, Crockett became America's original...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399152784
• ISBN13: 9780399152788
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
• Length: 339 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Good fast read, throughly enjoyable

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Buddy Levy's style of writing, as my wife would say, doesn't interfere with the story. It's a page turner. His other book about Cortez the Conquistador is even better. I wish there were more writers who wrote about historical events for the casual reader and made them entertaining not tiring.

A True American

I think the subject would have like the way the author writes this book. It shows David as a real person rather than the John Wayne characters in those movies. He was a real person and did not care what the folks in D.C. thought of him. His stand for the American Indians cost him his seat in Congress. This rest is History.

Authoritative on the Real Man

This book is incredible. It hashes out the truth from the legend flawlessly, seamlessly. This is the perfect historical novel!

Enjoyable, and more-than-adequate peek at a pioneer...

I liked this book. Despite the presence of numerous footnotes and a bibliography, it is a "popular" text rather than a "scholarly" one. I found it a quick and compelling read, but then I've been a Crockett fan since I was 11 back in 1955 (or was I a Fess Parker fan? No, it was Crockett, as it turns out.) I had not read any full-length bios of the man, although the recent book "Three Roads to the Alamo" deals extensively with Crockett, Jim Bowie and William B. Travis. I enjoyed Billy Bob Thornton's performance as Davy in the recent big-budget Alamo movie, and in fact, was one of the few who liked the film as a whole. If you saw that movie, you'll see a lot of Thornton in this book's depiction of Crockett. Davy comes off as a pretty decent man, consistently trying to live his principles in a tough life situation. Certainly, he seems more admirable overall than Bowie or Travis, although I was suprised to learn that Davy was even a slave-owner briefly, and sold one of the three slaves inherited by his second wife in order to pay his debts. Bowie, of course, was an active slave-trader, and Travis even brought his personal slave to the Alamo. But Crockett was brave throughout his life, broke throughout his life, uneducated but talented, likeable and outgoing, a political failure and yet a celebrity. He did not intend, upon traveling to Texas in late 1834, to end up dead at the Alamo. Once there, he had a couple of weeks during which he could have left. By choosing to remain, he became an enduring symbol of courage. If that kind of life appeals to you, spend a week or so reading "American Legend." You'll be glad you did.

intriguing biography

For us boomers raised on the remarkable 1950s Disney production, AMERICAN LEGEND substantiates much of the Davy Crocket TV shows, but also augments it with insight into how much more complex a person the frontier legend was regardless of Buddy Ebson's summarizing ballad. Buddy Levy fills much of the gaps including mildly negative commentary. For instance, there is insight into Crockett's two wives, five children and four step-children in which the hero's itchy feet kept him on the road a lot; both his strong spouses took care of the home front with iron wills, but the hero was not home that often (regardless of offspring count). Interesting to this reviewer's memory of the Disney show has Mr. Crocket going to Washington as a success story, but the biographer paints a more balanced picture of a somewhat failed politician. However, the most interesting new items (at least to me) is Crockett wrote a bestselling autobiography in which he barnstormed the country selling it and his dispute with his former Commander in the Creek War President Jackson over the abusive Indian Removal Act of 1830. This is an intriguing look at an individual who in the first half of the nineteenth century was a living legend that authenticates how accurate the Disney portrayal was; one worth reading and the other worth watching Harriet Klausner