March 19th

Bruce Willis is 53 today, Glenn Close is 61 and Ursula Andress is 72.

Philip Roth is 75 today.

Roth’s novels often feature smart, middle-class, fiercely honest Jewish characters. Perhaps Roth’s best-known character is Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in nine of his novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997 ) and his most recent novel, Exit Ghost (2007). Zuckerman, like Roth, is a novelist, and Roth has noted that the books featuring Zuckerman are like “hypothetical autobiographies” — ideas of what Roth might be doing. However, Roth has said that Exit Ghost will be the final appearance of Nathan Zuckerman. In an interview with The New Yorker after the book’s release, Roth said of Zuckerman’s departure, “Will I miss him? No. I’m curious to see who and what will replace him.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Congress approved Daylight Saving Time on this date in 1918. Word hasn’t reached Arizona.

Bob Dylan’s first album, titled Bob Dylan, was released 46 years ago today.

Wyatt Earp was born on this date in 1848. He died in 1929, age 80. Larry McMurtry had an essay on Earp, Back to the O.K. Corral in The New York Review of Books three years ago. (You can read the whole article for $3.)

I am talking, of course, about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which, for starters, wasn’t fought in the O.K. Corral—the shooting occurred across the street in a vacant lot adjacent to the local photographer Camillus Fry’s rooming house. Some say the shooting only lasted fifteen seconds; others give it twenty seconds, or even thirty. Local estimate was that some thirty shots were fired, at close if not quite point blank range. Three men were killed and three wounded. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was neither more nor less violent than a number of shootings that had occurred in Tombstone or its environs in the few short years of the community’s existence. It solved nothing, proved nothing, meant nothing; and yet, 123 years later, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is reenacted every day in Tombstone, Arizona, to paying customers—lots of paying customers.

The most recent O.K. Corral movie stars Kevin Costner as Wyatt; the next most recent, released a few months earlier, stars Kurt Russell as Wyatt, with Val Kilmer as Doc. There are so many gunfight-at-the O.K.-Corral movies that they constitute a kind of subgenre of the western. In the most lyrical version, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp.

What I’m wondering is why, in this day and time, anyone should care about Wyatt Earp, or any Earp, or the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, either. The Battle of the Little Bighorn at least offers heroism, spectacle, and mass, whereas the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was merely a bungled arrest. Virgil Earp, not Wyatt, was the peace officer in charge that day. How do we get from a bungled arrest to Henry Fonda, Hugh O’Brian, Burt Lancaster, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, and all the other movie land Wyatts? I’d like to know.

Three-time Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States, “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan was born on March 19th in 1860. Bryan is known most for his “Cross of Gold Speech,” which got him the nomination in 1896, and at the Scopes evolution trial in 1925, where his dogmatic views were seen by some as indicative of American ignorance and anti-intellectualism.