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Pearl Zane Grey (1872-1939) was an American author (and dentist!) best known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the western genre; he idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book.

Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on January 31, 1872. His parents were Lewis Grey and Alice Josephine Zane Grey. He was an excellent baseball player in school and won a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied to become a dentist. 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 to pursue his dream of being a writer. He began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice.

His first novel, Betty Zane, was inspired by stories he heard about the Ohio frontier as a child. Unfortunately, he was unable to sell it at the time and self-published it. He began to study his craft and travel to the west, taking notes and copying down dialog he heard. He studied other successful novels, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and continued to polish his craft. His next three novels were all rejected by publishers, though. Instead of giving up, though, he perseviered.

Grey married longtime girlfriend Lina Elise “Dolly” Roth in 1905 after a passionate and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels. After they married, 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.

Finally Grey got his first break, selling The Heritage of the Desert in 1910 to Harper's Magazine. It became a best-seller. Two years later, Harper’s also published Riders of the Purple Sage—and his career was properly launched. Zane Grey was officially more than a one-book wonder.

After publication of The Heritage of the Desert, the family had moved west to Altadena, California. Grey also aquired a hunting lodge in Arizona. Each year, Grey spent time traveling in the west and fishing in the Pacific. He then would return home and spend time writing.

While Dolly managed Grey's career and raised their three children (Romer, Betty, and Loren), 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 this 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 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.

Grey died unexpectedly of a heart attack on October 23, 1939. By the time of his death, he had authored almost ninety books. The majority were westerns, but he also wrote nine books that had a fishing theme; several about baseball; a biography of George Washington as a young man; many short stories; and several stories for children.

—Karl Wurf

Rockville, Maryland

Chapter One

BEN IDE named this lonely wandering stream Forlorn River because it was like his life.

Ben was well-born and had attended school until sixteen years of age, but from the time he had given up to his passion for the open country and the chase of wild horses he had gotten nowhere. That seemed the way of Forlorn River. It had its beginning in Clear Lake, a large body of surface water lying amid the Sage Mountains of northwestern California. It had begun well enough at its source under the beautiful rounded bare mountains of gray sage, and flowed bravely on for a few miles, then suddenly it became a lost river. That was what it was called by the Indians.

It meandered around under the foothills with their black fringe of juniper, into the wide gray valleys where thousands of wild horses roamed; to and fro across the open country as if seeking escape, on toward the dark pine-timbered ranges of Nevada; and back again, a barren little stream without creeks or springs to freshen it, a wilderness waterway, dear to the Indian and horse-hunter and cowboy; slackened by the thirsty Clay Flats to the west, and crowded away on the north by the huge red bluff that blocked entrance into Wild Goose Basin, forced at last to describe a wandering hundred-mile circle and find on the other side of the sage-hills, not far from its source, a miserable sand-choked outlet into the vast level ranch and pasture-land which had

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Forlorn River. Zane Grey

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Introduction

Chapter One