Arizona Author and Museum Director’s Five Favorite Biographies of Arizona Women

Stuart Rosebrook, executive director of Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, and True West’s editor-at-large, has edited TW’s Western Books department since 2013. He also currently serves as vice president of Western Writers of America. Earlier this year, Sharlot Hall Museum republished Margaret Maxwell’s long out-of-print biography of Sharlot M. Hall, Passion for Freedom.  Here are five must-read biographies/autobiographies, including Maxwell’s, of Arizona of Arizona women whose lives left a lasting legacy.

Passion for Freedom: The Life of Sharlot Hall by Margaret Maxwell (Sharlot Hall Museum): The only major biography to be written about the groundbreaking Arizona woman, profiles the first American women to hold paid public office in the United States.

Vanished Arizona, Recollections of My Army Life by a New England Woman by Martha Summerhayes (Bison Books): Originally published in 1908, the honest and frank book about life as an Army wife has never been out of print.

Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest by Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day (Random House): Like Sharlot Hall, Sandra Day O’Connor was a ranch woman at heart—and a groundbreaker, too, as America’s first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday by Chris Enss (TwoDot): Enss’ biography of the fiercely independent Hungarian immigrant turned prostitute is the definitive chronicle of the life of Mary Katherine Horony Cummings.

Josephine “Sadie” Earp: The Sordid Truth 1870-1883 by Peter Brand (Independently Published): Australian author Brand’s original research reveals the reality of Josephine Marcus’s troubled life before she was Wyatt Earp’s wife and champion.