Perhaps more than any other modern American novelist, Zane Grey caught the imaginations of several generations of readers. From 1910 until 1925, his books appeared regularly on best-seller lists, and even today, in both hardcover and paperback, his fiction remains popular. His novels have been translated into so many languages and published in so many editions that exact sales figures are virtually impossible to ascertain, although estimates suggest that well over 130 million copies of his books have been sold during the past seventy-five years. Most critics, however, have responded unfavorably to Grey's writing. They point to his verbose descriptions, his convoluted plots, his predictable characters, and his excessive romanticism, relegating him to a position of significance chiefly as a phenomenon of popular culture.
Born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1872, Pearl Zane Grey's boyhood was spent fishing and playing baseball, reading classics and dime novels with equal pleasure, and scribbling his own embryonic short stories. At the University of Pennsylvania he played more baseball and halfheartedly studied dentistry while he dreamed of a career as a writer. Graduating in 1896, he started a dental practice in New York City. His first attempt at realizing his dream was Betty Zane (1903), a fictional account of Grey's own Ohio ancestors, written in the romantic mode of James Fenimore Cooper. Betty Zane, and Grey's two subsequent efforts, strongly resemble the Leather-Stocking Tales in both plot and characterization, although Grey's version of Cooper's Natty Bumppo is more violent and less transcendent. Meanwhile, Grey had fallen in love with Lina Elise Roth who unreservedly believed in his talent. After the two were married in 1905, he gave up his dental practice and they moved to a cottage in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where he could concentrate on his writing. The initial results were disappointing, for only an occasional magazine article about fishing brought any income.
Just as it seemed he would have to return to dentistry, he met "Buffalo" Jones, who suggested that Grey accompany him back to his Arizona ranch to observe the West firsthand and to write about Jones's efforts to crossbreed cattle with buffalo. Enthusiastically, Grey agreed, and he became entranced with Western life. He crossed the desert on horseback to the Grand Canyon, and along the way participated in such unfamiliar activities as chasing buffalo, capturing wild horses, killing mountain lions, and exploring Indian ruins. After the publication of The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), a nonfiction account of that 1907 visit, he then recast his western adventures in fictional form. With this novel, The Heritage of the Desert (1910), Grey had found a formula for success, an adaptation of the "easterner goes West to learn about life" pattern of Owen Wister's best-selling The Virginian (1902), embellished with his own richly pictorial imagination. The Heritage of the Desert narrates the story of Jack Hare who, through a series of physical and emotional tests, learns the meaning of manhood. Hare's encounters with such forces of nature as sandstorms and stampedes, his battles with such powers of evil as rustlers and gunmen, educate him in the ways of the West. He learns the Darwinian lesson that only the fittest survive, that he must kill or be killed, and thus he assimilates what Grey calls "the heritage of the desert." Then the novel ends peacefully with a Utopian vision of future happiness with the woman he loves.
This simple initiation formula--a neophyte's growth from innocence to experience and to ultimate success in the West--Grey repeated variously in all his novels. Perhaps his most popular version of this formula was Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), where Lassiter, a prototypical gunman with a mysterious past, rides into the life of Jane Withersteen, a woman beset by troubles. A series of violent confrontations with forces of evil teach Jane that she must fight, while Lassiter learns from her the influence of love. Although the crucial initiation is Jane's, for she absorbs the Darwinian lesson so important in Grey's thinking, the softening of Lassiter exemplifies the romantic side of Zane Grey's version of the West. Years later Grey affirmed the idealistic principle behind his writing when he acknowledged that his fiction spoke to "the spirit, not the letter, of life." Certainly this is true of Riders of the Purple Sage, where one finds violence and even sadism mixed with romantic interludes and panoramic scenery. Designed for readers who sought the vicarious pleasures of escaping into romance rather than for those who wanted to read about the realities of Western life, Riders of the Purple Sage presents a fictional frontier where might finally is synonymous with right and where idyllic dreams come true.
For the next decade, while he continued relying on his standard formula for inspiration, Grey infused his writing with creative energy and vigor. Each best-seller tells a story that follows a similar pattern of initiation, but with modifications and transformations. For example, the protagonist who matures after encountering the masculine West is a wealthy Eastern woman in The Light of Western Stars (1914), a surveyor for the railroad in The U. P. Trail (1918). The Lassiter figure grows more mysterious and larger than life, a killer turned lawman in The Lone Star Ranger (1915), a quasi-religious outcast in Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923). And even villains like Kells, leader of The Border Legion (1916), display nuances of decency in their malevolent personalities. Grey's themes vary too: he argues conservative attitudes toward patriotism, morality, and religion, while he arrives at conflicting conclusions about conservation, violence, and justice. After Nevada (1928), his novels began to lose their popular appeal. Hastily conceived and mechanically written, the plots grew more repetitious and the characters shallower. Nonetheless, his works continued to sell. Even after his death in 1939, his publishers kept bringing out his unfinished manuscripts, and today Grey still ranks among the best-selling popular novelists of all time.
Critics point to Zane Grey's many faults and stress his inability to reconcile the opposites of his romantic idealism and his social Darwinism in any meaningful way, but they now recognize his impact on the American reading public. Despite flagrant excesses of style and unresolved paradoxes, Grey gave people what they wanted. Opening one of his 63 novels, or attending one of the 105 feature films based on his stories, his enthusiasts approached an imaginative frontier. There they could find an affirmation of traditional values; they could share in a successful initiation process; they could escape vicariously from the pressures of the twentieth century. Rather than teach his readers about modern life, Grey tantalized them with the possibilities of the romance, providing along the way some of the finest descriptions of nature in Western writing.
This is the complete article, containing 1,107 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
