Zane Grey

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Nickianne Moody

Author Zane Grey had a significant and lasting influence on American culture. Considered the creator of the modern Western novel, his work shaped the imagery of the West in the popular imagination. Many evaluations of the genre concentrate on the literary attributes of its writers. These literary considerations tend to outweigh the cultural resonance of the Western's popular appeal and often lead to the underrating of Grey's work in particular. As well as his ability to establish place and evoke the landscape of the mythical West, Grey endowed his work with a sense of popular history. He also negotiated cultural tensions that revolve around such issues as the coming of modernity, marriage, religion, and the returning veterans of World War I, which appealed to an exceptionally broad range of readers. He was serialized in the Ladies Home Journal as well as Colliers Country Gentleman and McCalls, and numerous books of his were translated into films, some made by his own company. He insisted that these were shot on location, thus introducing, through the cinema, a very particular visual depiction of the West that still endures. Arizona is now known to tourists as Zane Grey country.

Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1875. He studied dentistry at Pennsylvania University, and then practiced in New York, where he published his first novel Betty Zane under his real name, Pearl Grey. His first books, set in Ohio, were based on family history of the pioneer period, and followed in the tradition of James Fennimore Cooper. However, although filled with adventure, they did not really convey the sense of the Wild West in a cohesive or effective form. Then, in 1907, at the Campfire Club in New York, Grey met Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, a conservationist who labored to save the buffalo from extinction. He joined Jones as a writer and photographer on a trip to Arizona and across the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon, and during these travels met and lived with Native Americans, cowboys, and Texas rangers; thereafter his writing evolved into authentic and convincing descriptions of the West. He wrote his first account of his travels in Last of the Plainsmen (1908), but did not become successful until the publication of The Heritage of the Desert (1910), which established his individual style. In the prefatory note to Last of the Plainsmen, Grey writes, "As a boy I read of Boone with a throbbing heart, and the silent moccasined, vengeful Wetzel I loved. I pored over the deeds of vengeful men--Custer and Carson, those heroes of the plains. And as a man I came to see the wonder, the tragedy of their lives, and to write about them."

Grey's novels use the frontier west of the 98th Meridian to create a new landscape for the West. This rugged and exacting territory, inhabited by extremes of good and evil, legitimates violence, yet offers redemption. It also provided Grey with a fictional space through which to address the anxieties of the period in which he was writing, and to offer the prospect of escape from them. The Heritage of the Desert opens with intense religious imagery projected on to the desert landscape and leads into a dramatic romantic adventure. The eastern hero is nursed back to health by a Mormon, and falls in love with his half Navajo, half Spanish adopted daughter. The girl needs to be rescued from an impending marriage to the villain, a circumstance that culminates in a climactic shoot out. It was, however, with Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) that Zane Grey made his name. Originally rejected by the publishers because of its harsh treatment of Mormon culture, the novel went on to sell two million copies. Grey continued to travel throughout his career and incorporated his experience of landscape and knowledge of oral history directly into his fiction. He published 54 novels in his lifetime, and more were released posthumously. For the most part, they have very simple adventure plots, but are structured into thrilling and romantic episodes sustained by their evocative settings.

At the height of his popularity between 1917 and 1924, Grey's novels made Bookman's top ten bestseller list every year. The U.P. Trail (1918) and The Man of the Forest (1920), the two major bestsellers, illustrate the appeal of Grey's work. The U.P. Trail is based very specifically on the history of the Union Pacific Railroad between 1864 and 1869, and incorporates the endurance of the pony express rider and the introduction of the telegraph to the West. The background to the narrative accords with popular memory. The Man of the Forest is set in 1885, within living memory, and the story follows the integration of a woodsman into the community of the West through his romance with a spirited eastern girl. She finds her full potential in the West and is ready to build a homestead in "Paradise Park." Novels such as The Desert of Wheat (1919), The Call of the Canyon (1924), The Vanishing American (1925), Under Tonto Rim (1926), and The Shepherd of Guadaloupe (1930) are set contemporaneously and deal with modern issues and recent changes. They therefore establish the ethos of the West as a living idea rather than a lost ideal.