Riders of the Purple Sage - Softcover

Arguably Zane Grey’s most popular novel and a forerunner of the western genre, Riders of the Purple Sage tells the story of a Mormon woman caught between the persecution of religious zealots and several “Gentile” gunmen seeking to lend her a helping hand. Set in Utah during the nineteenth century, this novel offers an early critique on the practice of polygamy and plural marriage in the Old West.

American author (Pearl Zane Grey) is best known as a pioneer of the Western literary genre, which idealized the Western frontier and the men and women who settled the region. Following in his father s footsteps, Grey studied dentistry while on a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Grey s athletic talent led to a short career in the American minor league before he established his dentistry practice. As an outlet to the tedium of dentistry, Grey turned to writing, and finally abandoned his dental practice to write full time. Over the course of his career Grey penned more than ninety books, including the best-selling Riders of the Purple Sage. Many of Grey s novels were adapted for film and television. He died in 1939.