Living for the Dream in Your Heart

Victor Carl Friesen is the kind of scholarly guy you’d like to have a beer with and talk Westerns. In his study Zane Grey’s Wild West: A Study of 31 Novels, he surveys half of Grey’s output and shares insights useful to contemporary readers.

Most will be familiar with Grey’s best-selling work, Riders of the Purple Sage, but did you know about his novel, Wildfire, in which the main character is a wild stallion, or The Vanishing American, a sympathetic portrayal of American Indians? The best parts of this important book, however, are the glimpses Friesen provides of Grey’s psyche:  the iconic Western author, who died in 1939, wrote because “people want to live for the dream in their hearts.”

–Max McCoy, author of Damnation Road