Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women, by Thomas H. Pauly. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 385 pages; $34.95 (cloth).

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Reviewed by Carlton Jackson, Department of History, Western Kentucky University, author of a biography of Zane Grey

Zane Grey is the world's best known writer of Western romance and historical novels. From l903, when his first novel, “Betty Zane,” was published, to “Western Union” of l939, the last one during his lifetime, the times Grey was off the best-seller lists were few and far between. At one point, he was the third best-seller - after the Bible and McGuffey's Reader - in American literary history.

Such novels as “Riders of the Purple Sage” thrilled generations of readers in the 20th century and now, so it appears, well into the 21st. Altogether, he penned some 40 western novels, 20 or so of them published after his death in l939, at 67.

Despite his huge popularity with the reading public (many of his novels were serialized in McCall's, Nation, and Field & Stream before coming out in book form), Grey suffered at the hands of “sophisticated” critics, many of whom called his work “sub-literary.” These came mostly from university English department professors about the country. It is, therefore, very much worthwhile to mention that the author of this latest biography of Zane Grey is a professor of English at the University of Delaware. He is to be congratulated for departing from the ways of his colleagues and treating ZG in the honest and professional manner he deserves.

The author follows an essentially chronological pattern in presenting his subject. Born in Zanesville, Ohio, an avid fisherman and baseball player, Grey ultimately followed in his father's footsteps and became a dentist. Though cooped up in a New York City dental office, Grey always thought about a writing career. His first major publications were later called the Ohio River Trilogy. These included “Betty Zane,” “Spirit of the Border” and “The Last Trail.” These were supplemented many years later by “George Washington: Frontiersman.” Grey went West in the early '00s with a character named Buffalo Jones, and after this trip, there was no stopping him. He vicariously lived many of the characters he wrote about. He became, in fact, a cowboy, engineer, rancher, range boss, Don Quixote, and a dozen other personalities, most of whom in real life could not possibly have accomplished all that Grey ascribed to them. But if characterization was sometimes weak, his descriptions were superlative. Many of the images we still have of the Old West today come to us via Zane Grey.

What is not so generally known about Grey is that he was a world-class fisherman. And it is this aspect of his life that causes author Pauly to have a somewhat imbalanced treatment of this great Western novelist. He spends too much time with Grey's boats, the Tuna Club in Southern California, with all its arrogance, snobbery and elitism. In the long run, dedicated Zane Grey aficionados do not care a whit about such things: They are much more interested in how the latest ZG hero rescued a fair damsel from the clutches of a most evil villain.

And, of course, it is true that ZG, despite the high moral tone of his novels, apparently had affairs with numerous women he hired as his secretaries - or at least this is the implication in this volume. The author does not actually and explicitly say if this is so - but if it is, its shock value certainly would have been greater in l939 than in 2006.

Despite it all, English professor Pauly has written a readable book about the most famous Western author of all time. In social history classes, we frequently hear about “cultural lag,” meaning, loosely enough, that ideas and innovations come along more quickly than the general public can assimilate them. It takes a while. In the case of ZG, however, “cultural lag” is exactly reversed. The academics are only now discovering what the general public has known all along: Zane Grey is an author well worth our attention.