Zane Grey

American · 1872 to 1939

Born Pearl Zane Gray on January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio, the town his great-grandfather had founded, he was the fourth of five children of a dentist with a violent temper. He loved baseball and fishing more than school, and he wrote a first long story as a boy, which his father tore to pieces. A baseball scholarship carried him to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied dentistry, and he practiced for years in New York, pulling teeth by day and filling notebooks by night. He dropped the e from Gray and built a sterile, joyless office he could barely stand. His early novels failed, and publishers rejected him repeatedly until a 1907 trip to Arizona gave him the desert country he had been missing. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) made him famous and went on to sell roughly two million copies, fixing the shape of the popular Western for decades. He wrote more than ninety books, among them The Heritage of the Desert (1910), The Lone Star Ranger (1915), The U.P. Trail (1918), and The Vanishing American (1925), many of them filmed during the silent era and after. A restless outdoorsman, he chased big game fish across the world and held several saltwater angling records, and he kept lavish records of the women in his life. For seventeen straight years his titles ranked among the nation's best-sellers. He died of heart failure on October 23, 1939, at his home in Altadena, California, at the age of sixty-seven, leaving a backlog of manuscripts that his publisher issued for years after his death.