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This week (January 30-February 5) in literary history –
Frank Nelson Doubleday died (January 30, 1934); Zane Grey was born (January 31,
1872); A.A. Milne died (January 31, 1956); Lord Byron’s The Corsair was published (February 1, 1814); Mary Shelley died
(February 1, 1851); Alexandre Dumas married Ida Ferrier (February 1, 1840);
James Joyce was born (February 2, 1882); Samuel Clemens began using the pen
name Mark Twain (February 2, 1863); James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in Paris (February 2, 1922); John Keats
becomes aware that he has tuberculosis (February 3, 1820); James Fenimore
Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans was published (February 4, 1826); Norton
Simon was born (February 5, 1907); Thomas Carlyle died (February 5, 1881).
Highlighted story of
the week -
On January 31, 1872, prolific western novelist Zane Grey and
author of Riders of the Purple Sage, was
born in Zanesville, Ohio. The son of a successful dentist, Grey enjoyed a happy
and solid upper-middle-class childhood, marred only by occasional fistfights
with boys who teased him about his unusual first name, Pearl. (Grey later
replaced it with his mother's maiden name, Zane.) A talented baseball player as
teen, Grey caught the eye of a scout for the University of Pennsylvania baseball
team, who convinced him to study there. In 1886, he graduated with a degree in
dentistry and moved to New York to begin his practice.
Grey's interest in dentistry was half-hearted at best, and
he did not relish the idea of replicating his father's safe but unexciting
career path. Searching for an alternative, Grey decided to try his hand at
writing; his first attempt was an uninspiring historical novel about a family ancestor.
At that point, Grey might well have been doomed to a life of dentistry, had he
not met Colonel C. J. "Buffalo" Jones in 1908, who convinced Grey to
write Jones' biography. More importantly, Jones took him out West to gather material
for the book, and Grey became deeply fascinated with the people and landscape
of the region.
Grey's biography of Jones debuted in 1908 as The Last of the Plainsmen to little
attention, but he was inspired to concentrate his efforts on writing historical
romances of the West. In 1912, he published the novel that earned him lasting
fame, Riders of the Purple Sage. Like
the equally popular Owen Wister novel, The
Virginian (1902), the basic theme of Riders revolves around the
transformation of a weak and effeminate easterner into a man of character and
strength through his exposure to the culture and land of the American West.
Grey's protagonist, the Ohio-born Bern Venters, spends several weeks being
tested by the rugged canyon country of southern Utah before finding his way
back to civilization. Venters, Grey writes, "had gone away a boy-he had
returned a man." Though Riders of
the Purple Sage was Grey's most popular novel, he wrote 78 other books
during his productive career, most of them Westerns. He died on October 23,
1939 at the age of 67, from heart failure at his estate in Altadena,
California. After his death, Grey's works continued to be extraordinarily
popular for decades to come.
Check back every
Friday for a new installment of “This Week in Literary History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of six nonfiction books
that include the award winning Literary
Greats of the British Isles and the recently published America’s Literary Legends. Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for
more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Literary-Legends-Burial-Writers/dp/0764347020/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422638767&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+thomas+barry&pebp=1422638807355&peasin=764347020
