On January 31, 1872 author Zane Grey, author of Riders of the Purple Sage, is born in Zanesville, Ohio. He was the son of a successful dentist, who 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 college 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
ancestress. 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. Though Riders of the Purple
Sage was Grey's most popular novel, he wrote 78 other books during his
prolific career, most of them Westerns. He died in 1939, but Grey's work
continued to be extraordinarily popular for decades to come and by 1955, his
books had sold more than 31 million copies around the world. With the possible
exception of Riders, today Grey's books are little read, and most modern
readers find them insufferably pompous, moralizing, and sentimental.
Nonetheless, Grey played a pivotal role in creating the Western genre that, in
the hands of more recent authors like Louis L'Amour, continues to charm many
dedicated fans.
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Great-Britains-Literary-Legends-Writers/dp/0764344382/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3
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