Grey, (Pearl) Zane

(US 1872–1939)

Born in Zanesville, Ohio, a town named after his great-great-grandfather, Zane Grey won a basketball scholarship and qualified as a dentist, earning extra income by writing fiction for boys before becoming one of the most prolific and successful writers of Western novels of his time. His marriage to Lina Elise Roth in 1905 was a turning-point, since his wife funded his first trip to the West where he gathered material for his first fully fledged Western novel, The Heritage of the Desert (1910). She is also known to have corrected Grey's manuscripts and acted as his financial manager throughout his career. Grey published over seventy-seven titles, and among these Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) remains his single best-known work. The U.P. Trail (1918) and The Vanishing American (1925) also show Grey's Arizonaset Western formula at its best.

Larry McMurtry, Stephen Crane.

See WESTERN  WB