riders of the purple sage zane grey 1912

Having grown up Mormon myself and having spent a considerable amount of time in Utah throughout my life, I thought it would be a fascinating read. Set in the fictional Mormon town of Cottonwood, Utah in 1871, the novel follows Jane Withersteen’s quest to defend her large tract of land from conniving cattle rustlers and the abusive Mormon leaders in her own community. To explore how Grey’s vision of the West influenced classic Hollywood filmmakers, I decided to read his most commercially successful novel and the first one adapted into a film: 1912’s Riders of the Purple Sage. For a short time period, Grey even created his own production studio to better control the film adaptations of his works. Dozens of his novels were adapted into over a hundred films with the majority of them being made in the 1930s and 1940s. Writing dozens of novels and short stories starting in the first decade of the 20th century up until his death in 1939, Grey also heavily influenced the depiction of the old west in Hollywood. “Few popular novelists have possessed such a grasp of what the public wanted and few have developed Grey’s skill at supplying it.Ohio-born author Zane Grey, originally a dentist and minor league baseball player before becoming a successful writer, was instrumental in solidifying the major themes, characters, and tropes of the American Western genre.

Told by a master storyteller, Zane Grey’s “popularity was neither accidental nor undeserved,” wrote Nye. A number of friends, including Bern Venters and Lassiter, a famous gunman and killer of Mormons, do their best to help her, but her strong adherence to her creed compel her to prevent Venters and Lassiter from killing the adversaries who are slowly ruining her. Withersteen is beset by troubles, but throughout much of the novel she struggles with her “blindness” and inability to fully grasp the nature of her church and its leaders. Elder Tull, a church leader, wants her to marry him, but she does not want to, a refusal he does not brook well. Left in an unusual situation for a Mormon woman of her time, the as yet unmarried Jane Withersteen had inherited a large and rich piece of property from her father. Critic Russell Nye wrote that it “combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture,” and it played a critical role in shaping the formula for the Western novel.įirst published by Harper & Brothers in 1912, it tells the story of Jane Withersteen, a sincere and faithful young Mormon woman who is persecuted by members of her own Mormon fundamentalist church.

Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage has been called “the most popular western novel of all time” (Fred Stenson, 2004). “Where I was raised a woman’s word was law.

Riders of the purple sage zane grey 1912