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This Week in the West, Episode 13: Zane Grey

Welcome to the blog about our podcast “This Week in the West.” Each week, we’ll share the show’s scripts here on our blog. If you want to listen, click above, subscribe on your favorite podcast app or check back here every Monday.

If you have questions, ideas or feedback about the podcast, you can reach out to podcast@nationalcowboymuseum.org

Episode 13: Zane Grey

Howdy folks, it’s the fourth week of January 2025 and welcome to This Week in The West.

I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.

It’s lost to history when this dentist precisely decided his practice was too dull and that writing should be his life’s pursuit.

He may have been pulling a tooth or drilling a cavity, but as the 19th Century ended, Dr. Zane Grey knew he was bored and depressed with his current life.

In the years that followed, despite publishers’ rejections and struggles with his mental health, Zane Grey became one of the most popular Western novelists in history. He was born this week, January 31, 1872.

Grey dabbled in creative writing and poetry in college at the University of Pennsylvania, but spent most of his time focused on baseball. He played some ball in the minor leagues, but he concluded that neither the sport nor writing was his future.

The practical answer was dentistry.

But Grey kept writing at night, eventually writing the story of a fishing trip he took with his brother and selling it to a magazine in 1902. He left copies in his office waiting room for patients to peruse.

That same year, Grey read The Virginian, a novel by Owen Wister considered a foundational work of the Western genre. In the years that followed, Grey was determined to do two things – visit the West and write a full-length novel.

He took hunting expeditions near the Grand Canyon, surviving in challenging conditions and studying his daring guides and other characters of the West.

He’d later say, “Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work.”

After his trips West, he wrote more novels, but editors still showed no interest. One of them told Grey, “I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.”

But in 1910, Grey had a breakthrough. After minor success with magazine articles and books for kids, his book “The Heritage of the Desert” became a bestseller. He followed with three more novels — including one about baseball — before convincing Harper Publishing to release “Riders of the Purple Sage” in 1912.

The book told the story of gunfighters and outlaws among the Mormon Settlers of Southern Utah in the 1870s. It gained widespread popularity and eventually became the one of best-selling Western novel of all time.

More success followed. Each year from 1915 to 1924, Gray had a new novel on the annual list of top-10 bestsellers. Thanks to money from his book sales, it was then that he started traveling extensively to pursue his abiding passion for fishing.

While his sales dipped during the Great Depression, Grey remained financially stable thanks to Hollywood, which turned many of his books into movies. “Riders of the Purple Sage” alone was filmed four times between 1918 and 1941. In 1936, seven Zane Grey-inspired movies were released. In total, more than 100 movies and television shows have been made from Grey’s writings so far.

Although Zane Grey was one of the first American authors to become a millionaire, he still had critics. Some said his books were one-dimensional with overly moral characters, creating the white-hat hero and black-hat villain that would become a Western trope.

T.K. Whipple, a critic, author and contemporary of Grey said: “Zane Grey has looked (at the West) through the eyes of a Sunday School Superintendent; his moral fervor has prevented him from accepting his desperadoes and cowpunchers in their own spirit; they must be improved and improving.”

After a particularly harsh review in 1923, Grey wrote a 20-page screed titled “My Answer to the Critics,” but left it unpublished.

Grey lived out his days traveling around the world, including visiting Australia and the South Pacific before dying on October 23, 1939, at the age of 67.

Grey is still one of the best-selling authors of all time: some estimates say he has sold more than 250 million books. Many of his books are still in print today.

And with that, we’ll turn the page on another episode of “This Week in The West.”

Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler.

Follow us and rate us on Apple podcasts or wherever you hear us. That helps us reach more people.

We can follow us on social media and online at nationalcowboymuseum.org.

Got a question or a suggestion? Drop us an email at podcast@nationalcowboymuseum.org

We leave you today with some words from Earle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason mystery novels: “(Zane Grey) had the knack of tying his characters into the land, and the land into the story. There were other Western writers who had fast and furious action, but Zane Grey was the one who could make the action not only convincing but inevitable, and somehow you got the impression that the bigness of the country generated a bigness of character.”

Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. 

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