Michael Wallis
Activity Sheet

Biography
Michael Wallis is a historian and biographer of the American West. A best-selling author and award-winning reporter, Wallis has written 10 best sellers, including Route 66: The Mother Road, The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West, and Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. Wallis has been thrice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was also nominated for the National Book Award. He has won several other prestigious awards and honors, including the Oklahoma Center for the Book Lifetime Achievement Award Winner in 1999.
Michael Wallis has been a writer since l968. Wallis's work has been published in national and international magazines and newspapers, including Time, Life, People, Smithsonian, Texas Monthly, and The New York Times. He is a contributing editor for Oklahoma Today.
Born in Missouri in 1945, Michael was educated at Western Military Academy and attended the University of Missouri at Columbia. He completed graduate English and history studies at Southeast Missouri State University and at the University of Arizona branch in Guadalajara, Mexico. During his early years as a writer, he held a variety of jobs, including bartender, hotel waiter, social worker, printer, and ranch hand. He also served with the Marine Corps and was honorably discharged as a sergeant.
Wallis moved to Miami, Florida, in 1978 where he spent twenty-one months working as a special correspondent in Time's Caribbean Bureau. He covered the Cuban refugee exodus, crime and drug smuggling, and major news events for Time-Life News Service and also contributed to several other domestic and foreign publications.
Since 1982, Michael and his wife, Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, have made their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Real Wild West:
The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West
Book Description from amazon.com
Although not as renowned as Buffalo Bill Cody, Joseph Miller and his brothers were in many ways as impressive as impresarios. Their Wild West shows, which competed with Cody's show and the Ringling Brothers' circuses, featured talent like Will Rogers and Tom Mix and significantly influenced American mass entertainment. In The Real Wild West, Michael Wallis makes a case that the Millers didn't just invent the romantic West but lived it as well.
Like Cody before them, the Millers took their cues from the frontier, largely because they played a significant part in its conquest. The family's rambunctious Kentuckian patriarch, George Washington Miller, abandoned the bluegrass of his home state to raise cattle on the greener pastures of the plains. His sons followed suit, but in 1905, a rodeo at the 101, their 100,000-acre-plus Oklahoma ranch, for the National Editorial Association led to a new career in popular entertainment. Within a decade, film producer Thomas Ince had set up shop nearby, utilizing talent from the 101 for his westerns. (It was Ince's mysterious death, combined with revelations of financial chicanery, that ultimately destroyed the enterprise in the 1920s.)
Wallis doesn't sugarcoat accusations of murder and illegal financial maneuverings on the part of the Millers, instead making interesting parallels between their ruthlessness and business acumen and the romantic vision of the West they presented to early-20th-century audiences. His account is also notable for its numerous biographies of 101 performers -- people like Princess Wenona, the Native American rival to Annie Oakley, and Bill Pickett, an African American cowhand who founded most of the events on the professional rodeo circuit--and conveys the enthusiasm many must have felt during the Wild West shows' heyday.

Route 66: The Mother Road
Book Description from amazon.com
Wallis (Oilman) has spent some 17 years researching and writing this nostalgic revisiting of a road that more than any other kindled the wanderlust after WWII. It was a route that symbolized long- distance auto travel. Here are some 220 period and contemporary photos (190 in fair to fine color). His text covers the history of the road, the hustlers, the builders, the small businessmen that depended upon 66 to bring the customers.

Way Down Yonder in the Indian Nation :
Writings from America's Heartland
Book Description from Kirkus Reviews
A broader view of the ground Wallis covered in Oil Man (1988) and Pretty Boy (1992): the history and lore of Oklahoma and its inhabitants, from the earliest days to the present. One of Wallis's strong suits is his ability to convey the collision between Oklahoma's frontier origins and its role in the modern world. There's plenty of solid material here: Topics run the gamut from the rowdy 1889 land rush to the quiet modern influx of Mennonite farmers; from a visit to the sleepy panhandle town of Texoma to a survey of Tulsa's numerous art-deco buildings.
The author is at his best in affectionate sketches of such Oklahoma originals as maverick football-star Joe Don Looney, Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller, and cowboy Jim Jordan. Most of the chapters originally appeared as magazine pieces (in Oklahoma Today, American West, etc.), and three are reprinted from the author's previous books -- so the approach is inconsistent from one chapter to the next. Some, such as the one on the ``Thunderbirds,'' the 45th Infantry Division of WW II, effectively combine history, personal observation, and color, but others, such as a guide to popular barbecue joints, are puff pieces of little lasting value -- especially since there's no evidence that the article has been revised or updated in the 11 years since its magazine appearance.
And while Wallis's upbeat attitude and aggressively folksy style are probably perfect for Oklahoma Today, they don't wear well at book length. Well-researched and sympathetic view of the American heartland--but best read the way it was originally written, in chapter-size bites.

You may email Michael Wallis at TWG@thewallisgroup.com

Michael Wallis Virtual Campfire
http://www.michaelwallis.com/

Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers Biography
http://poetsandwriters.okstate.edu/halloffame/wallis.html