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Born Pearl Zane Gray, western author Zane Gray left potential careers in baseball and dentistry when he discovered and began writing about the Old West.
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Zane Gray and his wife, Dolly, lived in Lackawaxen between 1905 and 1918. At this house, now the Zane Grey Museum, he began his writing career.
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Zane Grey’s western romances of the good, the bad, and the pretty were transformed into 130 Saturday matinee chivalrous shoot-‘em-ups with good guys in white hats, bad guys in black hats, and love conquering all.
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Lackawaxen museum and festival celebrates creator of mythical Code of the West
When Zane Grey visited the western states at the turn of the last century, he collected stories from the old timers who were still alive to tell its tales. These stories served as a backdrop for Grey’s pen to create romantic novels of good guys, bad guys and pretty women whose love transformed fence-sitting bad guys into a heroic good guys .
The Zane Grey Museum, converted from the Lackawaxen home where Grey began his writing career, was, on July 16 and 17, host to the Second Annual Zane Grey Days Festival. The National Park Service, operators of the museum since 1989, presented a program featuring the Life and Times of Zane Grey, a tour of the grounds and the home that Grey and his wife, Dolly, occupied from 1905 to 1918, and viewings of three of the over one hundred films that had been produced from his novels.
Although best known for his western fiction, Grey wrote children’s books and stories about baseball and fishing. He studied dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania under a baseball scholarship and his lifelong love was sport fishing. He held eleven world records for deep-sea fishing and is considered to be among the greatest of all deep-sea anglers.
Pearl Zane Gray
Zane Grey was born in 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio, a town founded by the pioneering maternal Zane side of his family. His birth name, Pearl Zane Gray, was atributed to the “pearl gray” outfits of Queen Victoria. His family changed the spelling of their last name to Grey in the late 1890s. Once he began writing westerns, he dropped his effeminate first name.
As a youth, Grey enjoyed fishing, baseball and writing—a pursuit discouraged by his practical father. His skill at pitching earned him a scholarship and his father encouraged him to use it to continue in the family practice of dentistry.
Although, in 1898, he established a dental practice in New York City and attracted many young woman patients who preferred the strong hands of this athletic ball player, Grey preferred to playing ball and fishing to pulling teeth.
His finest catch was made on a fishing trip to Lackawaxen in 1902. While canoeing on the Delaware River, 33-year-old Doc Grey met 17-year-old Lina Elise “Dolly” Roth. The trip lead to his first published writing, A Day on the Delaware. His first publication, bolstered by the support of Dolly, encouraged Grey to write his first book, Betty Zane, a novel based on his family’s pioneering defense of Fort Wheeling during the Indian Wars. The book sold poorly.
The Delaware trip also lead to his purchase of Lackawaxen property in 1904 and his marriage to Dolly in 1905. Their honeymoon to the Grand Canyon and California opened Grey vision to the beauty of the west. Supported by Dolly’s unfaltering support and an inheritance she had received, Grey plunged into a full-time writing career.
After completing two additional novels about his family’s Ohio pioneering days—a trilogy of unsuccessful novels, with the last of Dolly’s inheritance, in 1907, Grey joined Colonel J. C. "Buffalo" Jones on a Grand Canyon expedition. Jones became the basis of his non-fiction story, The Last of the Plainsmen, published in 1908.
In 1910, Harper & Brothers published The Heritage of the Desert, Zane Grey's first western novel and his first success. Next came Grey's most noted work, Riders of the Purple Sage, published in 1912.
Grey published over eighty books that included 57 western novels and ten books of western non-fiction. The silent movie era producers turned his books into movies—a practice that continued into the talkies. Screen plays based on his themes and characters were turned into a hundred and thirty films.
Grey got the film bug and moved to California to start a production company, Zane Grey Productions, which he later sold to what would become Paramount Studios. Between his book sales, movies, rights and the sale of his production company, Grey became a millionaire and used his wealth to travel the world pursuing sports fishing.
Zane Grey died in 1939, at the age of 67 and Dolly died in 1957. The ashes of both were interred in a cemetery near their home in Lackawaxen.
Zane Gray Days
The Zane Grey Day Festival featured a visit to the house where Grey wrote his first western novels. The house contains his furniture, photographs of Grey, his books and books about him.
Among the exhibitors at the festival, dressed in a western outfit and toting a bullwhip was Steven Miller of Lancaster. Miller, a pediatric dentist, an ironic homage to Grey’s early career as a dentist, joined the 300-member Zane Grey’s West Society five years ago after a birthday visit to the Zane Grey Museum.
“My office is all western,” said Miller an active member of the Society. “I’m a Zaney.”
“Zane Grey’s a romantic,” explained Miller. “I like his ideas of nature and of doing-the-right-thing when the time comes. He was concerned with conservation. He supported the underdog, was pro-Indian., and spoke up about social issues that he thought were unjust,”
An avid western reader his whole life, Miller has been reading one Grey novel after another since his birthday visit to the museum.
“Zane Grey is a romantic,” continued Miller. “His books may begin with a man who is physically in bad health and goes out west—to die or whatever and becomes invigorated by nature. He meets a woman. She civilizes him. He saves her and it ends in romance.”
“Grey writes about the Code of the West,” Miller added. “The code of right and wrong. People call it frivolous. I call it chivalrous.”
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