Bryan Burrough

speaker

583 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 4d ago

Bryan Burrough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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Gunfighters · Ep. 01: When Gunfighters Stalked the Old West · 15 Sep 2026 podcast

But first I want to introduce myself and try and explain what we're up to here.

I'm the author of eight books, and I've been a writer at places like the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and Texas Monthly for going on 40 years now.

I've been fascinated by the gunfighters of the Old West since I was in sixth grade, when I was like 11.

What started it for me was a bunch of movies I saw around then.

This would be in the early 1970s.

The most important being Paul Newman and Robert Redford in 1969's very popular Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I thought it was a super film, and believe me, it holds up well.

Give it a shot.

It's Redford at his best.

But what preoccupied me, really what fascinated me, was the question of how much of it could possibly be true.

My little 11-year-old's world was full of rules, you know, when to eat, when to study, when to throw my paper out.

Was there really a time when grown men seemed to run around with like almost no rules at all?

Shooting and robbing banks and trains seemingly at their leisure?

It wasn't that I wanted to be an outlaw or a criminal.

I was just startled that parts of America could have been that different, and not so long before.

Anyway, I had to know.

I had been to the library in my Texas hometown many times by then, but this began a period where I pretty much lived there, at least after school was out, reading everything I could find on Butch and Sundance and other frontier gunfighters.

Once the library

Began ordering books from other libraries for me, I began showing up with real anticipation to see if I had a new book to read.

I guess I was pretty surprised how much of that movie ended up being true.

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