Walter Noble Burns was an American journalist and author whose books helped shape popular ideas about the Old West. Best known for The Saga of Billy the Kid and Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest, he combined historical research with dramatic storytelling. His portraits of outlaws and lawmen played an important part in turning regional histories into widely shared legends.

Burns began in newspaper work, spent time in California and aboard a whaling ship, and later established himself as a Chicago reporter and critic. These experiences gave him material for both maritime and frontier writing. His first book, A Year with a Whaler, drew on life at sea, while subsequent research took him into the stories and surviving memories of the American Southwest.

His Western trilogy also includes The Robin Hood of El Dorado, centered on Joaquín Murrieta. Burns's energetic narratives influenced later books, films, and other portrayals of frontier figures, but their embellishments require care when they are used as history. His lasting significance lies in the power of that storytelling: he helped determine not only which figures were remembered, but also the imaginative forms in which later generations encountered them.