Publisher's Synopsis
Nearly two decades after his death, John Wayne is still America's favourite movie star. In this book, Gary Wills investigates such astonishing durability. He focuses on the manufacturing of 'John Wayne' from the raw material of Marion Morrison - the young man from Iowa who became a myth. Wills charts Wayne's rise to stardom, from the cowboy serials that almost doomed his career, through his breakthrough with John Ford's Stagecoach and Howard Hawks's Red River, to the pinnacle of his popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. John Wayne stood for an America that people felt was disappearing. He became the lens through which the American people saw their own and their country's history. John Wayne's story is a large one - as large as the truths, and evasions, with which his screen image was confected. It produced some film masterpieces, and involved some of the greatest talents in film-making. And it involved all Americans. It is a fascinating, unparalleled phenomenon which, with great insight, Gary Wills explains for the first time.
