Who was Zane Grey?
The greatest western writer ever!!! Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the rugged Old West. As of June 2007, the Internet Movie Database credits Grey with 110 films, one TV episode, and one entire TV Series based on his novels and stories. Pearl Zane Gray was born 31 October 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio. He was one of five children born to Lewis M. Gray, a dentist, and his wife, Alice “Allie” Josephine Zane, whose Quaker ancestor Robert Zane came to America in 1673. Zane Grey would later drop his first name; his family changed the spelling of their last name to Grey. Growing up in Zanesville, a city founded by a maternal ancestor Ebenezer Zane, a Revolutionary War patriot, he developed interests in fishing, baseball and writing, all which would later contribute to his acclaim. His first three novels memorialized the heroism of his Revolutionary relatives. [1] As
Thursday, April 8, 2004 … xpectation of replicating the famous Zane Grey hunting lodge in Payson reminds … xpectation of replicating the famous Zane Grey hunting lodge in Payson reminds … onto Creek ranch. For 30 years after Zane Grey left Arizona, his lodge fell vi … s, he had become acquainted with the Zane Grey property near Tonto Creek, and …
Pearl Zane Grey, born in 1872, was a high school baseball player who was offered incentives to turn professional, but instead studied dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, and limited his post-college athletic career to playing ball for the Orange Athletic Club in East Orange, NJ. Zane Grey wanted to be a writer but he first became a dentist, following in his father’s footsteps. After graduating from college in 1896, he opened his dental practice at 100 West 74th Street in New York City. His brother Romer, also a baseball player, became a dentist and joined him in the practice. Grey practiced dentistry during the day and wrote stories at night.
Born Pearl Zane Gray, he was weaned on the stories of romantic writers such as Daniel Defoe, James Fenimore Cooper and Robert Louis Stevenson. He played first-team baseball at the University of Pennsylvania, then followed his father into dentistry. But always he wanted to write. When he discovered the West, he had found the place he wanted to write about. Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912, was a huge hit, and he followed it with more than 70 others over the years, in addition to books about other subjects. Married to a strong woman, Lina Elise “Dolly” Roth, who acted as his editor and agent, Grey also became a world-famous big-game fisherman. By the time of his death in 1939 from a heart attack at age 67, Grey had written 89 books. Today, Grey’s Old West is dismissed as a place that never existed. And yet the Old West fiction or fact continues to exert a powerful hold on the American psyche.
