Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

 

Pearl Zane Grey gave up a promising career as a dentist

Review

If you do any online searches to find out what are the best classic western novels, three books show up on pretty much every list: Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, Owen Wister's The Virginian, and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Perhaps because Zane Grey's books were all over the paperback racks when I was a kid, I expected Riders of the Purple Sage to consist mostly of pulp-style action. I was surprised to discover that it's really pure melodrama. Western-style action does figure in the novel -- in the form of shootouts and horseback chases -- but the story leans far more heavily on romance, suppressed emotions, dark secrets, and long declarations of love complete with "palpitating" bosoms. The writing is old-fashioned and often repetitious. The long-delayed revelations (of which there are many) are, more often than not, painfully obvious. The intricate web of relationships borders on the absurd. And yet... and yet... I loved this book! 

Early on, the main narrative bifurcates into two almost separate stories. In one, the Mormon woman who has inherited her father's ranch must, with the help of a mysterious lone gunman, defend it from ruthless men who will take it from her by any means necessary. In the other, a young man comes of age as he rescues a beautiful girl and builds a life with her in a hidden valley he discovers that's literally a lost world. (How many genre staples did you count in that description?) The villains of this work have the blackest hearts you've ever encountered, and the twist is that they are all high-ranking Elders of the Mormon church. Indeed, I had decided that Zane Grey must have hated Mormons, but a little research afterwards told me that his feelings were mixed.* 

If you get past the archaisms and give yourself over to the story, you'll find yourself turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next, and what happens after that, and then what... Zane Grey doesn't stint on incidents right up to the very end. On top of that, his descriptive writing (especially in the hidden valley) can be first rate, and his insights into human nature are at times quite profound. There's a reason this particular title makes it onto all the classics lists.

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* See Zane Grey in Zion: An Examination of His Supposed Anti-Mormonism by Gary Topping (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1918&context=byusq)