Zane Grey

Pearl Zane Gray, known as Zane Grey (Zanesville, Ohio, 1872 – Altadena, California, 1939), was an American writer whose popular novels did much to shape the public image of the American frontier. He matters because he turned the Western adventure novel into a mass-market success and because his stories later reached audiences through films and television.

He grew up in Zanesville, where he became fond of baseball, fishing and writing. A baseball scholarship took him to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied dentistry and graduated in 1896. He practised as a dentist in New York while writing in the evenings, and eventually gave up dentistry to write full time. In 1905 he married Lina Roth, known as Dolly, who managed his career, his contracts and the family finances. The couple settled on a farm in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, but Grey spent long stretches away from home, and his many affairs were known to his wife, who largely tolerated them. His first story appeared in 1902. His interest in the West began in 1907, on a cougar-hunting trip in Arizona. In 1910 he published The Heritage of the Desert, which sold well, and in 1912 Riders of the Purple Sage, his best-known book. He also founded a film company, which he sold shortly afterwards to Jesse Lasky, a partner of the founder of Paramount Pictures.

His success gave him the means to travel widely and to devote only a few months a year to writing, often drawing on his own fishing and hunting experiences. The family moved to California in 1918 and settled in Altadena. Over his life he wrote around ninety books of Western adventure, and millions of copies were sold. His legacy lives on largely through screen adaptations: his novels and stories became more than a hundred films, as well as television episodes and a long-running series. He died in 1939 and was buried in Lackawaxen, where a museum now honours his memory.