Zane Grey

Titles in Fiction category:

• Betty Zane    

  In a quiet corner of the stately little city of Wheeling, West Va., stands a monument on which is inscribed:

• Border Legion, The    

  Joan Randle reined in her horse on the crest of the cedar ridge, and with remorse and dread beginning to knock at her heart she gazed before her at the wild and looming mountain range.

• Call of the Canyon, The    

  What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley Burch laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window.

• Desert Gold    

  I

• Desert of Wheat, The    

  Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling, smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men who had co ...

• Heritage of the Desert, The    

  "BUT the man's almost dead."

• Last of the Plainsmen, The

  One afternoon, far out on the sun-baked waste of sage, we made camp near a clump of withered pinyon trees. The cold desert wind came down upon us with the sudden darkness. Even the Mormons, who were finding the trail for us across the drifting sands, forgot to sing and pray at sundown. We huddl ...

• Last Trail, The    

  Twilight of a certain summer day, many years ago, shaded softly down over the wild Ohio valley bringing keen anxiety to a traveler on the lonely river trail. He had expected to reach Fort Henry with his party on this night, thus putting a welcome end to the long, rough, hazardous journey ...

• Light of Western Stars, The    

  When Madeline Hammond stepped from the train at El Cajon, New Mexico, it was nearly midnight, and her first impression was of a huge dark space of cool, windy emptiness, strange and silent, stretching away under great blinking white stars.

• Lone Star Ranger, The    

  To
  CAPTAIN JOHN HUGHES
  and his Texas Rangers

• Man of the Forest, The    

  At sunset hour the forest was still, lonely, sweet with tang of fir and spruce, blazing in gold and red and green; and the man who glided on under the great trees seemed to blend with the colors and, disappearing, to have become a part of the wild woodland.

• Mysterious Rider, The    

  A September sun, losing some of its heat if not its brilliance, was dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and billowy, rolled down from the higher country. They were smooth, sweeping, with long v ...

• Rainbow Trail, The    

  The spell of the desert comes back to me, as it always will come. I see the veils, like purple smoke, in the canyon, and I feel the silence. And it seems that again I must try to pierce both and to get at the strange wild life of the last American wilderness-- wild still, almost, as it e ...

• Riders of the Purple Sage    

  A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.

• Spirit of the Border, The    

  "Nell, I'm growing powerful fond of you."

• Tales of Lonely Trails

  John Wetherill, one of the famous Wetherill brothers and trader at Kayenta, Arizona, is the man who discovered Nonnezoshe, which is probably the most beautiful and wonderful natural phenomenon in the world. Wetherill owes the credit to his wife, who, through her influence with the Indians ...

• To The Last Man    

  It was inevitable that in my efforts to write romantic history of the great West I should at length come to the story of a feud. For long I have steered clear of this rock. But at last I have reached it and must go over it, driven by my desire to chronicle the stirring events of pioneer days. ...

• U.P. Trail, The    

  In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines of cottonwoods, ...

• Wildfire    

  For some reason the desert scene before Lucy Bostil awoke varying emotions--a sweet gratitude for the fullness of her life there at the Ford, yet a haunting remorse that she could not be wholly content--a vague loneliness of soul--a thrill and a fear for the strangely calling future, glorious, ...

• Young Forester, The    

  I loved outdoor life and hunting. Some way a grizzly bear would come in when I tried to explain forestry to my brother.

Titles in Short Stories category:

• Breaking into Fast Company

  They may say baseball is the same in the minor leagues that it is in the big leagues, but any old ball player or manager knows better. Where the difference comes in, however, is in the greater excellence and unity of the major players, a speed, a daring, a finish that can be acquired only in c ...

• False Colors

  ``Fate has decreed more bad luck for Salisbury in Saturday's game with Bellville. It has leaked out that our rivals will come over strengthened by a `ringer,' no less than Yale's star pitcher, Wayne. We saw him shut Princeton out in June, in the last game of the college year, and we are not o ...

• Knocker, The

  ``Yes, Carroll, I got my notice. Maybe it's no surprise to you. And there's one more thing I want to say. You're `it' on this team. You're the topnotch catcher in the Western League and one of the best ball players in the game--but you're a knocker!''

• Manager of Madden's Hill, The

  Willie Howarth loved baseball. He loved it all the more because he was a cripple. The game was more beautiful and wonderful to him because he would never be able to play it. For Willie had been born with one leg shorter than the other; he could not run and at 11 years of age it was all he co ...

• Old Well-Well

  He bought a ticket at the 25-cent window, and edging his huge bulk through the turnstile, laboriously followed the noisy crowd toward the bleachers. I could not have been mistaken. He was Old Well-Well, famous from Boston to Baltimore as the greatest baseball fan in the East. His singular ye ...

• Redheaded Outfield, The

  There was Delaney's red-haired trio--Red Gilbat, left fielder; Reddy Clammer, right fielder, and Reddie Ray, center fielder, composing the most remarkable outfield ever developed in minor league baseball. It was Delaney's pride, as it was also his trouble.

• Rube, The

  It was the most critical time I had yet experienced in my career as a baseball manager. And there was more than the usual reason why I must pull the team out. A chance for a business deal depended upon the good-will of the stockholders of the Worcester club. On the outskirts of the town was ...

• Rube's Honeymoon, The

  ``He's got a new manager. Watch him pitch now!'' That was what Nan Brown said to me about Rube Hurtle, my great pitcher, and I took it as her way of announcing her engagement.

• Rube's Pennant, The

  ``Fellows, it's this way. You've got to win today's game. It's the last of the season and means the pennant for Worcester. One more hard scrap and we're done! Of all the up-hill fights any bunch ever made to land the flag, our has been the best. You're the best team I ever managed, the gam ...

• Rube's Waterloo, The

  It was about the sixth inning that I suspected the Rube of weakening. For that matter he had not pitched anything resembling his usual brand of baseball. But the Rube had developed into such a wonder in the box that it took time for his let-down to dawn upon me. Also it took a tip from Raddy ...

• Winning Ball, The

  One day in July our Rochester club, leader in the Eastern League, had returned to the hotel after winning a double-header from the Syracuse club. For some occult reason there was to be a lay-off next day and then on the following another double-header. These double-headers we hated next to ex ...

About the Author

Prolific American writer and pioneer of Western as a new literary genre. Grey produced over sixty books, and almost as many have been published posthumously. In his works Grey presented the West as a moral battle ground, in which his characters are destroyed because of their unableness to change or redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. Grey's semioutlaw heroes were his most interesting creation, among them Lassiter in Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), a gunman who has lost a girl he loved to a Mormon preacher, and Buck Duane, the agonized killer of Lone Star Ranger (1915). Randolph Scott played a former outlaw in Fritz Lang's film Western Union (1941), based on Grey's novel. Grey's stories, set against the beautiful but harsh landscape of the West, have fascinated readers all over the world.

"Slingerland hated the railroad, and he could not see as Neale did, or any of the engineers or builders. This old trapper had the vision of the Indian - that far-seeing eye cleared by distance and silence, and the force of the great, lonely hills. Progress was great, but nature unspoiled was greater. If a race could not breed all stronger men, through its great movements, it might better not breed any, for the bad over-multiplied the good, and so their needs magnified into greed. Slingerland saw many shiningbands of steel across the plains and mountains, many stations and hamlets and cities, a growing and marvelous prosperity from timber, mines, farms, and in the distant end - a gutted West." (from The Roaring U.P. Trail, 1918)

Zane Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio. His father was a farmer and preacher, and mother Quaker, of Danish background. Grey graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in dentistry in 1896, and practiced in New York City until 1904. During these years he started to write. Grey's first book, Betty Zane, was turned down by several published, and in 1904 Grey published it privately. The colorful frontier story was based on his ancestor's journal. After the book gained a critical success, Grey continued his family story in The Spirit of the Border (1905). In his writing Grey was encouraged by his wife, Lina Elise Roth. They married in 1905. She supported his aspirations to become a professional writer.

In 1908 Grey made a journey to the West with Colonel C.J. ('Buffalo') Jones, who told him tales of adventure on the plains. The trip was a turning point in Grey's career. He began writing Western novels in the tradition of Owen Wister and produced the first, The Last of the Plainsmen, in 1908. In 1912 the publishing company Harpers brought out Riders of the Purple Sage. It sold two million copies, was filmed three times, and became Grey's best-known western. It told the story of an enterprising woman, Jane Witherspoon, a rich Mormon. "Trouble between the Mormons and the Gentiles of the community would make her unhappy. She was Mormon-born, and she was a friend of to poor and unfortunate Gentiles. She wished only to go on doing good and being happy. And she thought of what that great ranch meant to her. She loved it all - the grove of cottonwoods, the old stone house, the amber-tinted water, and the droves of shaggy, dusty horses and mustangs, the sleek, clean-limbed, blooded racers, and the browsing herds of cattle and the lean, sun-browned riders of the sage." She finds protection for her ranch and herself from an mysterious hero, Lassiter, who hates Mormons for his own reasons. This formula, in which a tormented outlaw fights to protect the good and finds love, Grey used in many novels.

JUDKINS: My name is Judkins. I don't know you, but I know... I've heard what you are... I heard you killed some men in the North.
LASSITER: Not just in the North.
(from the 1996 film Riders of the Purple Sage, dir. by Charles Haid)

Much of Grey's knowledge of the West was based on research or trips in the regions he wrote about. He also interviewed authentic residents of the Wild West. In 1918 Grey moved to California, and lived there for the rest of his life. He built a large, Spanish-style house in Altadena, and continued to produce the usual 100 000 words each month. While not writing, Grey fished in the South Seas, or hunter along the Rogue River in Oregon, or spent time on Catalina Island. According to some sources, he fished up to 300 days of the year. In Tales of Swordfish and Tuna (1927) he tells that he had exceptionally good luck in locating schools of large tuna. Grey died on October 23, 1939, in Altadena.

Grey's books dealt with settlers, cowboys, desperadoes, Indians, cattle drives, the advance of technology, family feuds, feuds between cattlemen and sheepherders, the bison hunting (The Thundering Herd), the defeat of the American Indian - all the aspects of West that later generations of writers and filmmakers utilized. Grey's style has been called antiquated, but it had much emotional power: "Memory stirred to the sight of the familiar corner. He had been in several bad gun fights in this town, and the scene of one of them lay before him. The warmth and intimacy of old pleasant associations suffered a chill." (from Sunset Pass, 1931) The Roaring U.P. Trail (1918) has been criticized for it melodramatic plot but acknowledged for its reliable historical description about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The Vanishing American (1925), Grey's own favorite work, recycled the idea of the noble savage familiar from The Last of the Mohicans. The social commentary on the treatment of American Indians on the reservation included also a love theme between a red man and a white woman. George B. Seitz's film The Vanishing American (1925) from Grey's novel was melodramatic but dramatized the progression of American Indian life, and their hopeless situation in a way that no film previously had attempted. "Promises from the white establishment reek hypocrisy: "We will help you live as white men live. We will teach you to farm, to turn the desert into green fields." Yet the start of the twentieth century finds the Indians living meagerly on inadequate reservations." (from Great Hollywood Westerns by Ted Sennett, 1990) In such short stories as 'The Great Slave,' 'Yaqui, and 'Tigre' Grey showed his knowledge of Indian tribes and their history and the peon system of Mexican plantations. In 'Tappan's Burro,' a story of a wandering gold prospector and his faithful burro, Grey masterfully described the beauty of desert plains, barren mountain country, and forest land.

"Madge's sombre eyes gazed out over the great void. But, full of thought and passion as they were, they did not see the beauty of that scene. But Tappan saw it. And in some strange sense the colour and wilderness and sublimity seemed the expression of a new state in his heart. Under him sheered down the ragged and cracked cliffs of the Rim, yellow and gold and grey, full of caves and crevices, ledges for eagles and niches for lions, a thousand feet down to the upward edge of the long green slopes and canyons, and so on down and down into the abyss of forested ravine and ridge, rolling league on league away to the encompassing barrier of purple mountain ranges." (from 'Tappan's Burro')

Greys sold 17 million copies during his life time. His non-fiction includes several tales of fishing. Grey left a number of manuscripts for novels, of which several has been published, among others The Reef Girl in 1977. Hollywood have used his books eagerly, according to one estimation 100 Western films have been based on Grey's stories. In the 1930s lowbudget Zane Grey films were highly popular and profitable for Paramount. Grey also wrote two screenplays, The Vanishing Pioneer and Rangle River.

Paramount had used the Zane Grey name as a draw since the silent era. Although Grey stories were low-budgeted, they were not meant only for juveniles. In the early phase of his career director, Henry Hathaway leant on Grey's stories and the actor Randolph Scott in several films. By 1935 they both were on their way to bigger productions. In Heritage of the Desert (1932) was in his fist starring role. Wild Horse Mesa (1932) was a tale of wild horse taming. Scott stops Fred Kohler who uses barbed wire to catch wild stallions. Under the Tonto Rim (1933) depicted a slow-witted cowboy who wins his manhood and the boss's daughter. In the romantic Western Man of the Forest (1933) Scott's pet lion helps him to escape from jail. To the Last Man (1933) was a story of a family feud healed by young love. Scott was austere and Shirley Temple made her debut. There is also a 'tastefully photographed' nude swimming sequence. The Thundering Herd (1933) was one of the best of Paramount's Zane Grey quickies. The story dealt with buffalo hunters and marauding Indians. Footage from William K. Howard's film from 1925 was used in the scene of the stampede of wagons across a frozen lake. The Last Round-Up (1934) starring Randolph Scott, was based on Zane Gray's novel The Border Legion. It told a story about a gang of rustlers and their boss who sacrifices his life for two young lovers. Stock footage from the silent version and Border Legion (1930) were used in the film. Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941) was beautifully photographed by Edward Cronjager.

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.