Overview

Author Details

Author Details

Grey, Zane

"Zane Grey, the greatest storyteller of the American West, was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on January 31, 1872. His Zane ancestors had been vigorous, illustrious pioneers in America?s ""First West"", the historic Ohio Valley, and his boyhood thrill at their adventures would eventually motivate Grey to novelize both his family?s own story and the stories of many another pioneer homesteader, farm wife, rancher, cowhand, naive Eastern belle, camp follower, miner, Indian youth, trail driver, railroad man, desperado, buffalo hunter, soldier, gambler, wanderer and poor wayfaring stranger, as the great migration Westward coursed in waves across the continent.
In his youth Zane Grey was a semiprofessional baseball player and a half-hearted dentist, having studied dentistry to appease his father while on a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. But he wanted above all to write, and taught himself to write with much stern discipline so as to free his innate and immense storytelling capacity. Many a lean year came and went as he waited for a publisher to finally recognize a best-seller when it saw one. For Zane Grey became the best-selling Western author of all time, and for most of the teens, 20s, and 30s, had a least one novel in the top ten every year.

His marriage in 1905 to Lina Roth, whom he called Dolly, was a triumph of the old-fashioned ""complementary"" model of matrimony, wherein the husband ranges freely to sustain the inspiration for his calling, in this case the writing of adventure-romances, and the wife tends the family, edits the manuscripts, and makes deals with the publishers. It is fair to say that Dolly?s belief in Zane?s calling was the single factor most responsible for the success of his lengthy career. Their first home was a farm house on 3 acres that Zane Grey bought before they were married, but the couple soon moved to a home on land her family owned on the Delaware River in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania."