Zane Grey

His novels are legendary: Riders of the Purple Sage, Betty Zane, The Vanishing American, and The U.P. Trail. His characters are unforgettable: Jim Lassiter, Bern Venters, Lew Wetzel, Buck Duane, and Madeline Hammond. His settings are colorful, austere, and filled with romantic mystery. In the early twentieth century, Zane Grey not only defined the cowboy hero and captured the Western landscape, he created one of the most elaborate and memorable bodies of folklore in American literature. Who was the man behind the legend? In Zane Grey: Romancing the West, Stephen J. May examines Grey's personal life, revealing that the writer was frequently immobilized by depression and insecurity. Grey's characters stemmed from an idealized vision of himself. His settings, most often centered in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, were pleasurable, picturesque escapes from the rigors of the writing life. Zane Grey: Romancing the West analyzes the writer's enduring mystique, from Grey's middle-class beginnings as a dentist's son in Zanesville, Ohio, to his mature roles as a world-class novelist, explorer, Hollywood film producer, fisherman, and outdoorsman. Grey's legend continues to enthrall a new generation of readers who are rediscovering the sights, sounds, and wild spaces of the historic American West.

The novel that set the pattern for the modern Western, Riders of the Purple Sage was first published in 1912, immediately selling over a million copies. In the remote border country of southern Utah, a man is about to be whipped by the Mormons in order to pressure Jane Withersteen into marrying against her will. The punishment is halted by the arrival of the hero, Lassiter, a gunman in black leather, who routs the persecutors and then gradually recounts his own history of an endless search for a woman abducted long ago by the Mormons. Secrecy, seduction, captivity, and escape: out of these elements Zane Grey fashioned his magnificent classic of the American West.

A leading figure in the debate over the literary canon, Jane Tompkins was one of the first to point to the ongoing relevance of popular women's fiction in the 19th century, long overlooked or scorned by literary critics. Now, in West of Everything, Tompkins shows how popular novels and films of the American west have shaped the emotional lives of people in our time. Into this world full of violence and manly courage, the world of John Wayne and Louis L'Amour, Tompkins takes her readers, letting them feel what the hero feels, endure what he endures. Writing with sympathy, insight, and respect, she probes the main elements of the Western--its preoccupation with death, its barren landscapes, galloping horses, hard-bitten men and marginalized women--revealing the view of reality and code of behavior these features contain. She considers the Western hero's attraction to pain, his fear of women and language, his desire to dominate the environment--and to merge with it. In fact, Tompkins argues, for better or worse Westerns have taught us all--men especially--how to behave. It was as a reaction against popular women's novels and women's invasion of the public sphere that Westerns originated, Tompkins maintains. With Westerns, men were reclaiming cultural territory, countering the inwardness, spirituality, and domesticity of the sentimental writers, with a rough and tumble, secular, man-centered world. Tompkins brings these insights to bear in considering film classics such as Red River and Lonely Are the Brave, and novels such as Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed and Owen Wister's The Virginian. In one of the most moving chapters (chosen for Best American Essays of 1991), Tompkins shows how the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, killer of Native Americans and charismatic star of the Wild West show, evokes the contradictory feelings which the Western typically elicits--horror and fascination with violence, but also love and respect for the romantic ideal of the cowboy. Whether interpreting a photograph of John Wayne of meditating on the slaughter of cattle, Jane Tompkins writes with humor, compassion, and a provocative intellect. Her book will appeal to many Americans who read or watch Westerns, and to all those interested in a serious approach to popular culture.