Zane Grey

 

Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

Described by some as “perhaps the most popular novel of the Old West ever published,” but certainly a seminal Western novel—and therefore, in a certain sense, a seminal American novel by default—either way. As Russell Martin wrote in The New York Times:

Grey created a fanciful world that related an archetypal American story—one that told us something important about what decent people we thought we were, and how each of us ought to act in the face of life’s mean tribulations.

But Grey’s mythical world was only loosely based on that brief moment in history when vast stretches of America actually were dominated by bison and Indians, bad men and frontier justice. ”The West is dead, my friend,” wrote the artist Charles M. Russell as early as l917.

A bestseller that has been adapted to film no less than five times, this is a novel that captured the American self-mythologizing imagination both in its time and for many years to come.