Westerns @ BPL - Zane Grey

Celebrate Rodeo Week in Brooks with the Brooks Public Library.  This week we’re introducing you to the Westerns genre and showing you titles and authors that you may be missing out on.

Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 - October 23, 1939) was an American author of popular adventure novels and pulp fiction that presented an idealized image of the rugged Old West. He became interested in this ideal after joining a friend on an expedition to trap mountain lions in Arizona in 1907. Grey wrote steadily, but it was only in 1910, and after considerable efforts by his wife, that his first western, Heritage of the Desert, became a bestseller. It propelled a career churning out popular novels about manifest destiny and the "conquest of the Wild West." He became one of the first millionaire authors. Over the years his habit was to spend part of the year traveling and living an adventurous life and the rest of the year using his adventures as the basis for the stories in his writings. Zane Grey died in 1939 and was interred at the Union Cemetery in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where the National Park Service maintains the Zane Grey Museum.

Grey’s works helped to influence the Westerns genre in fiction, and many writers still style their writing after his books. If you’re interesting in getting into Westerns, check out these books by Zane Grey today.