Zane Grey

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Zane Grey
Born January 31, 1872(1872-01-31)
Zanesville, Ohio
Died October 23, 1939 (aged 67)
Altadena, California
Occupation Novelist, dentist
Nationality American
Genres Western fiction

Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the rugged Old West. As of June 2007, the Internet Movie Database credits Grey with 110 films, one TV episode, and a series, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater based loosely on his novels and short stories.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Zane Grey holds a koala during a visit to Australia
Zane Grey holds a koala during a visit to Australia

[edit] Early life

Pearl Zane Gray was born 31 January 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio. He was one of five children born to Lewis M. Gray, a dentist, and his wife, Alice "Allie" Josephine Zane, whose Quaker ancestor Robert Zane came to America in 1673. Zane Grey would later drop his first name; his family changed the spelling of their last name to Grey. Growing up in Zanesville, a city founded by a maternal ancestor Ebenezer Zane, a Revolutionary War patriot, he developed interests in fishing, baseball and writing, all which would later contribute to his acclaim. His first three novels memorialized the heroism of his Revolutionary relatives. [1] As a child, Grey frequently engaged in violent brawls, and his father answered those actions with severe beatings. Though irascible and antisocial like his father, Pearl Grey was counterbalanced by a loving mother and a father substitute named Muddy Miser, an old fisherman who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing and who spouted philosophically on the advantages of an unconventional life, advice Grey later followed. His fundamentalist upbringing imprinted a lifelong distaste for alcohol and tobacco, but not for the temptations of the opposite sex. A severe financial setback caused Grey's father to move his family out of Zanesville and to start anew in Columbus, Ohio in 1889. His father struggled to re-establish his dental practice and to help out, Grey, who had learned basic dental extraction, made rural house calls as an unlicensed teenage dentist. He also worked as a part-time usher in a movie theater and played summer baseball, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer.

Grey attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, where he studied dentistry and joined Sigma Nu fraternity; he graduated in 1896. The Ivy League was highly competitive and an excellent training ground for future pro baseball players. He was a solid hitter and an excellent pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curve ball; however, when the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by ten feet in 1894, the effectiveness of his pitching suffered and he was re-positioned to the outfield.[2] He was an indifferent scholar. During that time, while playing 'summer nines' in Delphos, Ohio, Grey was charged with, and quietly settled, a paternity suit involving a 'belle of Delphos', foreshadowing future womanizing behavior. His father paid the $133.40 cost and Grey resumed playing summer baseball in Delphos, and managed to conceal the episode when he returned to Penn. [3] Grey went on to play minor league baseball with a team in Newark, New Jersey and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years. Additionally, his brother, Romer Carl "R. C." Grey, played briefly in 1903 for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

[edit] Marriage

While sporadically practicing dentistry in New Jersey, he often camped in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania with his brother R. C. and fished in the upper Delaware River. While waiting at a nearby train station, Grey met seventeen year old Lina Roth, better known as "Dolly", whom he would marry five years later. Dolly came from a family of physicians and was studying to be a schoolteacher.

After re-establishing his practice in New York City under the name of Dr. Zane Grey, he began to write again in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice. Grey was a natural writer but his early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak. With the help of Dolly and numerous writing guides, Grey's style gradually became more fluid and descriptive. His first magazine article, A Day on the Delaware, was published in the May 1902 issue of Recreation magazine.

Grey's first novel, Betty Zane (1903), dramatized the heroism of his ancestor who had saved Fort Henry, and it was likely published with funds provided by R. C.'s wealthy girlfriend Reba Smith. During his courtship with Dolly, Grey was still in contact with previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, "But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that...But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good". He added, "I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women".[4]

When they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career and they moved to a farmhouse in Lackawaxen, with Grey's mother and sister joining them. Grey ceased his dental practice and stopped playing baseball to devote full-time to his nascent literary pursuits. While his wife managed his career and raised their three children, Grey often spent months away from her, fishing, writing, and spending time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of his behavior and was occasionally jealous, especially early on, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice, and she did not blame him for it.

The Greys moved to California in 1918 spurred by the memory of a visit during their honeymoon. Then in 1920 they located to Altadena, California, where Grey bought a prominent mansion on East Mariposa Street, known locally as "Millionaire's Row," built by Chicago business machine manufacturer Arthur Woodward. The company Woodward founded is now known as Intermatic Corporation. Designed by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey (no relation to the author), the 1907 Mediterranean style house is acclaimed as the first fireproof home in Altadena, built entirely of reinforced concrete as prescribed by Woodward's wife, Edith Norton Woodward. Edith Woodward is a survivor of the Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903. Grey summed up his feelings for Altadena with a quote still used to this day in that city: "In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living."

[edit] His career

Grey’s honeymoon took him to the West for the first time, but though awed by the scenic splendor, he felt unsatisfied by the lack of experiences suitable for use in his novels. After attending a lecture by C. T. "Buffalo" Jones, famed western hunter and guide, Grey arranged for a mountain lion hunting trip to the North rim of the Grand Canyon. He brought along a ‘portable’ camera with the intention of documenting his trips in order to prove the veracity of his adventures. This and a second trip proved arduous and dangerous to the tenderfoot, but Grey learned much from his rough compatriot adventurers, and he gained the confidence and authenticity to write convincingly about the West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him.

Upon returning home in 1909, Grey tried to convert his experiences into a series of short stories but again met with rejection from the publishers. He wrote dejectedly, "I don’t know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want...I am full of stories and zeal and fire...yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false".[5]

The birth of his first child restored his sense of urgency to produce his next novel and his first Western, The Heritage of the Desert, which he completed in four months, and which became a bestseller. It propelled a career writing popular novels about manifest destiny and the "conquest of the Wild West." Two years later he produced his best-known book, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). He formed his own motion picture company, but in a few years sold it to Jesse Lasky who was a partner of the founder of Paramount Pictures. Paramount would make a number of movies based on Grey's writings.

It is also speculated that two of his creations, Lone Star Ranger (a novel later turned into a 1930 film) and King of the Royal Mounted (popular as a series of big little books and comics, later turned into a 1936 film), were later used as an inspiration for two radio series by George Trendle (WXYZ, Detroit) which later made the transition to television: The Lone Ranger and Challenge of the Yukon (Sgt. Preston of the Yukon on TV). The Zane Grey Show ran on the Mutual Broadcasting System for five months in the late 1940s.

He became one of the first millionaire authors. Over the years his habit was to spend part of the year traveling and living an adventurous life and the rest of the year using his adventures as the basis for the stories in his writings. Some of that time was spent on the Rogue River in Oregon, where he maintained a cabin he had built on an old mining claim he bought. He also had a cabin on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona which burned down during the Dude Fire of 1991.

He was the author of over 90 books, some published posthumously and/or based on serials originally published in magazines. Many of them became bestsellers. One of them, “Tales of the Angler’s El Dorado, New Zealand” helped establish the Bay of Islands in New Zealand as a premier game fishing area.

From 1918 until 1932 he was a regular contributor to Outdoor Life magazine, becoming one of the publication's first celebrity writers. In the pages of the magazine he began to popularize big-game fishing.

[edit] Fishing

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Sheridan Anderson
Charles Cotton
Frank Parker Day
John Dietsch
Henry van Dyke
Jack Gartside
John Gierach
Arnold Gingrich
Theodore Gordon
George F. Grant
Zane Grey
Paul Gustafson
Roderick Haig-Brown
Charles Hallock
Henry Herbert
Norman Maclean
James Prosek
Howell Raines
Skeet Reese
Ernest Schwiebert
Red Smith
Richard Walker
Chris Yates
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Grey indulged his interest in fishing with visits to Australia and New Zealand. He first visited New Zealand in 1926 and caught several large fish of great variety, including a mako shark, a ferocious fighter which presented a new challenge. Grey established a base at Otehei Bay Lodge on Urupukapuka Island which became a magnet for the rich and famous and wrote many articles in international sporting magazines highlighting the uniqueness of New Zealand fishing which has produced heavy-tackle world records for the major billfish, striped marlin, black marlin, blue marlin and broadbill. He held numerous world records during this time and invented the teaser, a hookless bait that is still used today to attract fish.

Grey also helped establish deep-sea sport fishing in New South Wales, Australia particularly in Bermagui, New South Wales, which is famous for Marlin fishing. Patron of the Bermagui Sport Fishing Association for 1936 and 1937, Grey set a number of world records, and wrote of his experiences in his book "An American Angler in Australia".

[edit] Catalina Island

Grey had built a getaway home in Avalon, Catalina Island, which now serves as the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, www.zanegreypueblohotel.com. Avid fisherman as he was he served as president of the Catalina's exclusive fishing club, the Tuna Club.

[edit] Death

Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939 at his home in Altadena, California. He was interred at the Union Cemetery in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where the National Park Service maintains the Zane Grey Museum as part of the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River. His home in Altadena is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In his hometown there is a museum called National Road Zane Grey Museum. Zane Grey Terrace, a small residential street in the hillsides of Altadena, is named in his honor.

[edit] Novels

[edit] Television & Film

[edit] Further reading

  • Zane Grey: "The Man Whose Books Made the West Famous" by Norris F. Schneider (1967)
  • Zane Grey: A Biography by Frank Gruber (1969)
  • Zane Grey by Carlton Jackson (1973)
  • Zane Grey by Anne Ronald (1975)
  • Zane Grey by Carol Gay (1979)
  • Zane Grey's Arizona by Candace C. Kant (1984)
  • Zane Grey: A Photographic Odyssey by Loren Grey (1985)
  • Zane Grey, A Documented Portrait by G.M. Farley (1985)
  • Selling the Wild West by Christine Bold (1987)
  • West of Everything by Jane Tompkins (1992)
  • Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women. by Thomas H. Pauly (2005)
  • Rider of the Purple Prose by Jonathan Miles, New York Times Book Review (1 January. 2006)
  • Zane Grey: A Study in Values - Above and Beyond the West by Chuck Pfeiffer (2006)
  • Ace of Hearts: The Westerns of Zane Grey by Arthur G. Kimball (1993)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Thomas H. Pauley, Zane Grey: His Life His Adventures His Women, 2005, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, p. 13, ISBN 978-0-252-07492-9
  2. ^ Pauley, p. 34
  3. ^ Pauley, p. 35
  4. ^ Pauley, p. 53, 57
  5. ^ Pauley, p. 89

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Grey, Zane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grey, Pearl Zane
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Zanesville, Ohio
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 1939
PLACE OF DEATH Altadena, California


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