Riders of the Purple Sage

Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Grey in 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio, a town founded by his mother’s pioneer family. He earned a dental degree from the University of Pennsylvania on the strength of his baseball skills, then practiced dentistry in New York City while nursing a restless ambition to write.

However, his early writings, while dripping with raw talent, suffered from grammar errors and an overly stiff style. This would only be resolved after he met, courted, and married Lina “Dolly” Roth, who would serve as his editor, splitting the proceeds fifty-fifty with him. Inspired by this new system as well as by Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Grey attempted a full-length novel of his own called Betty Zane(1903). Yet the immediate rejection from Harper & Brothers sent him into despair over his writing.

Four years later, a journey through the American Southwest changed the course of his life and arguably saved his career. Traveling on a hunting trip with the frontiersman Charles “Buffalo” Jones, Grey encountered the canyon country of Utah and Arizona, and its vast, colored landscapes gave him a subject he would return to for the rest of his career.

After documenting the trip in depth with cameras and notes, he gained the confidence to write about the American West. In the years that followed, he would produce bestsellers like The Heritage of the Desert(1910), but none could compete with Riders of the Purple Sage, published in 1912; it quickly became his signature work and one of the best-selling novels of its time.

Grey went on to write ninety books and became one of the first American authors to earn a fortune from his fiction. His novels sold in the tens of millions and were adapted for film repeatedly. A passionate outdoorsman who held several big-game fishing records, he divided his later years between writing and travel. He died in California in 1939 of heart failure, having done more than almost any writer to produce the romance of the Wild West in popular imagination.

Over the years that followed, Wister made repeated journeys through Wyoming and the wider West, filling notebooks with the speech, characteristics, and codes of conduct he observed among cowboys and cattlemen. He shaped that material into magazine stories and, eventually, into the novel that made him famous. The Virginian, published in 1902 and dedicated to his friend Roosevelt, became one of the best-selling books of its era, never once going out of print.

Wister went on to write other fiction, such as Lady Baltimore (1906), before focusing on historical biographies of famed figures like Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant. Although his work continued to gain acclaim, nothing matched the impact of his masterpiece. He passed away in Rhode Island in 1938, yet is remembered as the writer who gave the American Western its enduring signature style.