Zane Grey

Rare are authors like Jack London and Papa Hemingway, whose lives turned out to be as interesting as their books. But Zane Grey is another one of them. Owen Wister “invented” the Western story as we know it with his novel The Virginian. But it was Grey who became the most popular writer in America by the 1920s, and one of the richest, thanks to a long run of formula Westerns such as his Riders of the Purple Sage. Critics hated his work, calling it “drivel,” but the American public, bo