Bucking the Tiger: A Novel

An American Library Association Notable Book. John Henry Holliday was an Ivy League-educated dentist from a genteel Georgia family when at the age of twenty-one he was diagnosed with consumption and given six months to live. Instead over the next fifteen years he composed of his sojourn on Americas western frontier a paean to the ways in which a man might bluff death―and attain a measure of immortality.. In Bucking the Tiger Bruce Olds uses a pan-dimensional genre-blurring collage of original poems reconstituted news accounts adulterated epigraphs song lyrics and photographs simulated eyewitness testimony fictionalized memoir invented correspondence re-imagined folk history―less to restore the past of a figure who in his lifetime was more thoroughly mythologized than Jesse James or Billy the Kid than to re-story it entirely.. Evoking Doc Hollidays checkered careers as a frontier dentist itinerant saloon gambler professional faro dealer and occasional shootist (including his involvement in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral) Bucking the Tiger displaces the popular image of the Latin-spouting serial killer with the reality of a human being who exiled to an emotional and physical landscape to which he was singularly unsuited strove to make of his self-affliction an expression of sustained if often violent art.