Zane Grey The Spirit of the Border: A Romance of the Early Settlers in the in White

Zane Grey, original name Pearl Grey, (born Jan. 31, 1872, Zanesville, Ohio, U.S.died Oct. 23, 1939, Altadena, Calif.), prolific writer whose romantic novels of the American West largely created a new literary genre, the western.Trained as a dentist, Grey practiced in New York City from 1898 to 1904, when he published privately a novel of pioneer life, Betty Zane, based on an ancestors journal. Deciding to abandon dentistry for fulltime writing, he published in 1905 The Spirit of the Borderalso based on Zanes noteswhich became a bestseller. Grey subsequently wrote more than 80 books, a number of which were published posthumously more than 50 were in print in the last quarter of the 20th century. The novel Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was the most popular others included The Lone Star Ranger (1915), The U.P. Trail (1918), Call of the Canyon (1924), and Code of the West (1934). Prominent among his nonfiction works is Tales of Fishing (1925). (britannica.com)The more books Grey sold, the more the established critics, such as Heywood Broun and Burton Rascoe, attacked him. They claimed his depictions of the West were too fanciful, too violent, and not faithful to the moral realities of the frontier. They thought his characters unrealistic and much largerthanlife. Broun stated that "the substance of any two Zane Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp."T. K. Whipple praised a typical Grey novel as a modern version of the ancient Beowulf saga, a battle of... | Zane Grey The Spirit of the Border: A Romance of the Early Settlers in the in White