Early life Pearl Zane Grey was born January 31, 1872, in
Zanesville, Ohio. His birth name may have originated from newspaper descriptions of
Queen Victoria's mourning clothes as "pearl grey". He was the fourth of five children born to Alice "Allie" Josephine Zane, whose English
Quaker immigrant ancestor Robert Zane came to the American colonies in 1673, and her husband, Lewis M. Gray, a dentist. His family changed the spelling of their last name to "Grey" after his birth. Grey later dropped "Pearl" and used "Zane" as his first name. Grey grew up in Zanesville, a city founded by his maternal grandfather Benjamin Zane's brother-in-law, John McIntire (husband of Sarah Zane), who had been given the land by Grey's maternal great-grandfather,
Ebenezer Zane, an
American Revolutionary War patriot. Both Grey and his brother
Romer were active and athletic boys who were enthusiastic baseball players and fishermen. From an early age, he was intrigued by history. Soon, he developed an interest in writing. His early interests contributed to his later writing success. For example, his knowledge of history informed his first three novels, which recounted the heroism of ancestors who fought in the American Revolutionary War. As a child, Grey frequently engaged in violent brawls, probably related to his father's punishing him with severe beatings. Though irascible and asocial like his father, Grey was supported by a loving mother and found a father substitute. Muddy Miser was an old man who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing, and who talked about the advantages of an unconventional life. Despite warnings by Grey's father to steer clear of Miser, the boy spent much time during five formative years in the company of the old man. Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories such as
Robinson Crusoe and the
Leatherstocking Tales, as well as
dime novels featuring
Buffalo Bill and
Deadwood Dick. He was enthralled by and crudely copied the great illustrators
Howard Pyle and
Frederic Remington. He was particularly impressed with
Our Western Border, a history of the Ohio frontier that likely inspired his earliest novels. Grey wrote his first story,
Jim of the Cave, when he was fifteen. His father tore it to shreds and beat him. Because of the shame he felt as the result of a severe financial setback in 1889 due to a poor investment, Lewis Grey moved his family from Zanesville and started again in
Columbus, Ohio. While his father struggled to re-establish his dental practice, Grey made rural house calls and performed basic extractions, which his father had taught him. The younger Grey practiced until the state board intervened. His brother Romer earned money by driving a delivery wagon. Grey also worked as a part-time usher in a theater and played summer
baseball for the Columbus Capitols, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer. Eventually, Grey was spotted by a baseball scout and received offers from many colleges. Romer also attracted scouts' attention and went on to have a professional baseball career. The
Ivy League was highly competitive and an excellent training ground for future pro baseball players. Grey was a solid hitter and an excellent pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curveball. When the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by five feet to 60 feet 6 inches, in 1894 (primarily to reduce the dominance of
Cy Young's pitching), the effectiveness of Grey's pitching suffered. He was re-positioned to the outfield. The short, wiry baseball player remained a campus hero on the strength of his timely hitting. He was an indifferent scholar, barely achieving a minimum average. Outside class, he spent his time on baseball, swimming, and creative writing, especially poetry. Grey went on to play
minor league baseball with several teams, including the
Newark, New Jersey Colts in 1898 and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years. His brother
Romer Carl "Reddy" Grey (known as "R.C." to his family) did better and played professionally in the minor leagues. Zane Grey and Romer Grey played together as teammates for the 1895
Findlay Sluggers of the
Interstate League. Romer played a single major league game in 1903 for the
Pittsburgh Pirates.
Dentistry After graduating, Grey established his practice in New York City under the name of Dr. Zane Grey in 1896. It was a competitive area but he wanted to be close to publishers. He began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice. He struggled financially and emotionally. Grey was a natural writer but his early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak. Whenever possible, he played baseball with the Orange Athletic Club in New Jersey, a team of former collegiate players that was one of the best amateur teams in the country.
Marriage and family in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania After a passionate and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels, Grey and Dolly married five years later in 1905. Grey suffered bouts of
depression, anger, and
mood swings, which affected him most of his life. As he described it, "A hyena lying in ambush—that is my black spell! I conquered one mood only to fall prey to the next ... I wandered about like a lost soul or a man who was conscious of imminent death." During his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that. ... But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good ... I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women. After they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career. They moved to a farmhouse at the confluence of the
Lackawaxen and Delaware rivers, in
Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where Grey's mother and sister joined them. (This house, now preserved and operated as the
Zane Grey Museum, is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.) Grey finally ceased his dental practice to work full-time on his nascent literary pursuits. Dolly's inheritance provided an initial financial cushion.
Early writing career While Dolly managed Grey's career and raised their three children, including son
Romer Zane Grey, over the next two decades Grey often spent months away from the family. He fished, wrote, and spent time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of his behavior, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice. Throughout their life together, he highly valued her management of his career and their family, and her solid emotional support. In addition to her considerable editorial skills, she had good business sense and handled all his contract negotiations with publishers, agents, and movie studios. All of his income was split fifty-fifty with her; from her "share," she covered all family expenses. Their considerable correspondence shows evidence of his lasting love for her despite his infidelities and personal emotional turmoil. The Greys moved to California in 1918. In 1920 they settled in
Altadena, California, at a home later known as the '"
Zane Grey Estate"'. The estate was destroyed in the January, 2025 Altadena Fire. In Altadena Grey also spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro. The two met while hiking Eaton Canyon. Of her he wrote, I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the
Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her ... her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild. Grey summed up his feelings for the city: "In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living." With the help of Dolly's proofreading and copy editing, Grey gradually improved his writing. His first magazine article, "A Day on the Delaware," a human-interest story about a Grey brothers' fishing expedition, was published in the May 1902 issue of
Recreation magazine. Elated at selling the article, Grey offered reprints to patients in his waiting room. In writing, Grey found temporary escape from the harshness of his life and his demons. "Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is." By this time, he had given up baseball. Grey read
Owen Wister's great Western novel
The Virginian. After studying its style and structure in detail, he decided to write a full-length work. Grey had difficulties in writing his first novel,
Betty Zane (1903). When it was rejected by Harper & Brothers, he lapsed into despair. From the beginning, vivid description was the strongest aspect of his writing. in 1917. After attending a lecture in New York in 1907 at the
Camp-Fire Club by
Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, western hunter and guide who had co-founded
Garden City, Kansas, Grey arranged for a
mountain lion-hunting trip to the
North Rim of the
Grand Canyon. He brought along a camera to document his trips and prove his adventures. He also began the habit of taking copious notes, not only of scenery and activities but of dialogue. His first two trips were arduous, but Grey learned much from his companions on these adventures. He gained the confidence to write convincingly about the American West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him. He wrote, "Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work." Upon returning home in 1909, Grey wrote a new novel,
The Last of the Plainsmen, describing the adventures of Buffalo Jones. Harper's editor
Ripley Hitchcock rejected it, the fourth work in a row. He told Grey, "I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction." Grey wrote dejectedly, I don't know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want ... I am full of stories and zeal and fire ... yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false. The book was later published by the American magazine,
Outing, which provided Grey some satisfaction. Grey next wrote a series of magazine articles and juvenile novels. With the birth of his first child pending, Grey felt compelled to complete his next novel,
The Heritage of the Desert. He wrote it in four months in 1910. It quickly became a bestseller. Grey took his next work to Hitchcock again; this time Harper published his work, a historical romance in which
Mormon characters were of central importance. Hitchcock rejected it, but Grey took his manuscript directly to the vice president of Harper, who accepted it. The novel had a sequel (
The Rainbow Trail, in 1915), and was filmed five times (in
1918, 1925, 1931, 1941, and 1996; but in later film versions the villains are corrupt judges or lawyers, not Mormon polygamists).
Later career , Australia, 1936 (photographer,
T.C. Roughley) holding a
koala during a visit to Australia in December 1935 Zane Grey had become a household name; thereafter, Harper eagerly received all his manuscripts. Other publishers caught on to the commercial potential of the Western novel.
Max Brand and
Ernest Haycox were among the most notable of other writers of Westerns. Grey's publishers paired his novels with some of the best illustrators of the time, including
N. C. Wyeth,
Frank Schoonover,
Douglas Duer,
W. Herbert Dunton,
W. H. D. Koerner, and
Charles Russell. Grey had the time and money to engage in his first and greatest passion: fishing. From 1918 until 1932, he was a regular contributor to
Outdoor Life magazine. As one of its first celebrity writers, he began to popularize big-game fishing. Several times he went deep-sea fishing in Florida to relax and to write in solitude. Although he commented that "the sea, from which all life springs, has been equally with the desert my teacher and religion", Grey was unable to write a great
sea novel. He felt the sea soothed his moods, reduced his depressions, and gained him the opportunity to harvest deeper thoughts: Over the years, Grey spent part of his time traveling and the rest of the year writing novels and articles. Unlike writers who could write every day, Grey would have dry spells and then sudden bursts of energy, in which he could write as much as 100,000 words in a month. He wrote longhand in pencil with little punctuation and his first draft was the final one. Punctuation was added later by secretaries when they were preparing the manuscript for publication. He encountered fans in most places. He visited the
Rogue River in
Oregon in 1919 for a fishing expedition, and fell in love with it. He returned in the 1920s, eventually setting up
a cabin on the lower Rogue River. Grey captured the river's essence in two books:
Tales of Freshwater Fishing and
Rogue River Feud. Other excursions took him to
Washington state and
Wyoming. From 1923 to 1930, he spent a few weeks a year at his cabin on the
Mogollon Rim, in Central
Arizona. After years of abandonment and decay, the cabin was restored in 1966 by
Bill Goettl, a Phoenix air conditioning magnate. He opened it to the public as a free-of-charge museum. The
Dude Fire destroyed the cabin in 1990. It was later reconstructed 25 miles away in the town of
Payson. From 1925 to his death in 1939, Grey traveled more and further from his family. He became interested in exploring unspoiled lands, particularly the islands of the South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia. He thought Arizona was beginning to be overrun by tourists and speculators. Near the end of his life, Grey looked into the future and wrote:
Reception by critics 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 larger than life. 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 passions with one another and with the will, a struggle of love and hate, or remorse and revenge, of blood, lust, honor, friendship, anger, grief—all of a grand scale and all incalculable and mysterious." However, he also criticized Grey's writing: "His style, for example, has the stiffness which comes from an imperfect mastery of the medium. It lacks fluency and facility." Grey based his work in his own varied first-hand experience, supported by careful note-taking, and considerable research. Despite his great popular success and fortune, Grey read the reviews and sometimes became paralyzed by negative emotions after critical ones. In 1923, a reviewer said Grey's "moral ideas ... [were] decidedly askew." Grey reacted with a 20-page treatise, "My Answer to the Critics." He defended his intentions to produce great literature in the setting of the Old West. He suggested that critics should ask his readers what they think of his books, and noted actor and fan
John Barrymore as an example. Dolly warned him against publishing the treatise, and he retreated from a public confrontation. His novel
The Vanishing American (1925), first serialized in ''
The Ladies' Home Journal'' in 1922, prompted a heated debate. People recognized its
Navajo hero as patterned after
Jim Thorpe, a great Native American athlete. Grey portrayed the struggle of the Navajo to preserve their identity and culture against corrupting influences of the white government and of
missionaries. This viewpoint enraged religious groups. Grey contended, "I have studied the Navaho Indians for 12 years. I know their wrongs. The missionaries sent out there are almost everyone mean, vicious, weak, immoral, useless men." To have the book published, Grey agreed to some structural changes. With this book, Grey completed the most productive period of his writing career, having laid out most major themes, character types, and settings. His
Wanderer of the Wasteland is a thinly disguised autobiography. One of his books, "Tales of the Angler's El Dorado, New Zealand," helped establish the
Bay of Islands in New Zealand as a premier
game fishing area. Several of his later writings (e.g.,
Rangle River) were based in Australia.
Fishing with brother R.C. looking on Grey co-founded the "Porpoise Club" with his friend, Robert H. Davis of ''
Munsey's Magazine'', to popularize the sport of hunting of
dolphins and
porpoises. They made their first catch off
Seabright, New Jersey, on September 21, 1912, where they harpooned and reeled in a
bottlenose dolphin. Grey's son
Loren claims in the introduction to
Tales of Tahitian Waters that Zane Grey fished on average 300 days a year through his adult life. Grey and his brother R.C. were frequent visitors to
Long Key,
Florida, where they helped to establish the
Long Key Fishing Club, built by
Henry Morrison Flagler. Zane Grey was its president from 1917 to 1920. He pioneered the fishing of Boohoo fish (
sailfish). Zane Grey Creek was named for him. Grey indulged his interest in fishing with visits to Australia and New Zealand. He first visited New Zealand in 1926 and caught several large fish of great variety, including a
mako shark, a ferocious fighter that presented a new challenge. Grey established a base at Otehei Bay,
Urupukapuka Island in the
Bay of Islands, which became a destination for the rich and famous. He wrote many articles in international sporting magazines highlighting the uniqueness of New Zealand fishing, which has produced heavy-tackle world records for the major
billfish, striped
marlin, black marlin, blue marlin and broadbill. A lodge and camp were established at Otehei Bay in 1927 called the Zane Grey Sporting Club. He held numerous world records during this time and invented the teaser, a hookless bait that is still used today to attract fish. Grey made three additional fishing trips to New Zealand. The second was January to April 1927, the third December 1928 to March 1929, and the last from December 1932 to February 1933. Grey fished out of
Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, for many summers. Grey also helped establish deep-sea sport fishing in
New South Wales, Australia, particularly in
Bermagui, which is famous for marlin fishing. Patron of the Bermagui Sport Fishing Association for 1936 and 1937, Grey set a number of world records, and wrote of his experiences in his book
An American Angler in Australia. From 1928 on, Grey was a frequent visitor to
Tahiti. He fished the surrounding waters several months at a time and maintained a permanent fishing camp at
Vairao. He claimed that these were the most difficult waters he had ever fished, but from these waters he also took some of his most important records, such as the first marlin over . Grey had built a getaway home in
Santa Catalina Island, California, which still serves as the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel. He served as president of Catalina's exclusive fishing club, the
Tuna Club of Avalon.
Death Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939, aged 67 at his home in
Altadena, California. He was interred at the Lackawaxen and Union Cemetery,
Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. == Legacy ==