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Zane Grey is a Actor, Director and Scriptwriter American born on 31 january 1872 at Zanesville (USA)

Zane Grey

Zane Grey
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Birth name Pearl Zane Grey
Nationality USA
Birth 31 january 1872 at Zanesville (USA)
Death 23 october 1939 (at 67 years) at Altadena (USA)

Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book. In addition to the success of his printed works, they later had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and television productions. As of 2012, 112 films, two television episodes, and a television series, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater, had been made that were based loosely on his novels and short stories.

Biography

Early life
Pearl Zane Grey was born January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. His birth name may have originated from newspaper descriptions of Queen Victoria's mourning clothes as "pearl gray". He was the fourth of five children born to Alice "Allie" Josephine Zane, whose English Quaker immigrant ancestor Robert Zane came to America in 1673, and her husband, Lewis M. Gray, a dentist. His family changed the spelling of their last name to "Grey" after his birth. Later Grey dropped Pearl and used Zane as his first name. He grew up in Zanesville, a city founded by his maternal great-grandfather Ebenezer Zane, an American Revolutionary War patriot; from an early age, the boy was intrigued by history. Grey developed interests in fishing, baseball, and writing, all of which contributed to his writing success. His first three novels recounted the heroism of his ancestors who fought in the American Revolutionary War.

As a child, Grey frequently engaged in violent brawls, despite (or because of) his father's punishing him with severe beatings. Though irascible and antisocial like his father, Grey was supported by a loving mother and found a father substitute. Muddy Miser was an old man who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing, and who talked about the advantages of an unconventional life. Despite warnings by Grey’s father to steer clear of Miser, the boy spent much time during five formative years in the company of the old man.

Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories (Robinson Crusoe and Leatherstocking Tales) and dime novels (featuring Buffalo Bill and "Deadwood Dick"). He was enthralled by and crudely copied the great illustrators Howard Pyle and Frederic Remington. He was particularly impressed with Our Western Border, a history of the Ohio frontier that likely inspired his earliest novels. Zane wrote his first story, Jim of the Cave, when he was fifteen. His father tore it to shreds and beat him. Both Zane and his brother Romer were active, athletic boys who were enthusiastic baseball players and fishermen.

Due to shame from a severe financial setback in 1889 caused by a poor investment, Lewis Grey moved his family from Zanesville and started again in Columbus, Ohio. While the older man struggled to re-establish his dental practice, Zane Grey made rural house calls and performed basic extractions, which his father had taught him. The younger Grey practiced until the state board intervened. His brother Romer earned money by driving a delivery wagon. Grey also worked as a part-time usher in a movie theater and played summer baseball for the Columbus Capitols, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer. Eventually, Grey was spotted by a baseball scout and received offers from many colleges. Romer also attracted scouts' attention and went on to have a professional baseball career.


University of Pennsylvania and baseball

Grey chose the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, where he studied dentistry and joined Sigma Nu fraternity; he graduated in 1896. When he arrived at Penn, he had to prove himself worthy of a scholarship before receiving it. He rose to the occasion by coming in to pitch against the Riverton club, pitching five scoreless innings and producing a double in the tenth which contributed to the win. The Ivy League was highly competitive and an excellent training ground for future pro baseball players. Grey was a solid hitter and an excellent pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curve ball. When the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by ten feet in 1894 (primarily to reduce the dominance of Cy Young’s pitching), the effectiveness of Grey’s pitching suffered. He was re-positioned to the outfield. The short, wiry baseball player remained a campus hero on the strength of his timely hitting.

He was an indifferent scholar, barely achieving a minimum average. Outside class he spent his time on baseball, pool, and creative writing, especially poetry. His shy nature and his teetotaling set him apart from other students, and he socialized little. Grey struggled with the idea of becoming a writer or baseball player for his career, but unhappily concluded that dentistry was the practical choice.

During a summer break, while playing 'summer nines' in Delphos, Ohio, Grey was charged with, and quietly settled, a paternity suit. His father paid the $133.40 cost and Grey resumed playing summer baseball in Delphos. He managed to conceal the episode when he returned to Penn.

Grey went on to play minor league baseball with several teams, including the Newark, New Jersey Colts in 1898 and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years. His brother, Romer Carl "Reddy" Grey (known as "R.C." to his family) did better and played professionally in the minor leagues. He played a single major league game in 1903 for the Pittsburgh Pirates.


Dentistry
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. He began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice. He struggled financially and emotionally. Grey was a natural writer but his early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak. Whenever possible, he played baseball with the Orange Athletic Club in New Jersey, a team of former collegiate players that was one of the best amateur teams in the country.

Grey often went camping with his brother R.C. in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where they fished in the upper Delaware River. When canoeing in 1900, Grey met seventeen year-old Lina Roth, better known as "Dolly". Dolly came from a family of physicians and was studying to be a schoolteacher.


Marriage and family

After a passionate and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels, Grey and Dolly married five years later in 1905. Grey suffered bouts of depression, anger, and mood swings, which affected him most of his life. As he described it, “A hyena lying in ambush—that is my black spell ! I conquered one mood only to fall prey to the next...I wandered about like a lost soul or a man who was conscious of imminent death."

During his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, "But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that....But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good". He added, "I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women."

After they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career. They moved to a farmhouse at the convergence of the Delaware and Lackawaxen 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 devote full-time to his nascent literary pursuits. Dolly’s inheritance provided an initial financial cushion.


Writing career
While Dolly managed Grey's career and raised their three children, including son Romer Zane Grey, 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 his 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.

The Greys moved to California in 1918. In 1920 they settled in Altadena, California, where Grey bought a prominent mansion on East Mariposa Street, known locally as "Millionaire's Row". Designed by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey (no relation to the author), the 1907 Mediterranean-style house is acclaimed as the first fireproof home in Altadena, built entirely of reinforced concrete as prescribed by the first owner's wife. Grey summed up his feelings for the city: "In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living."

It was in Altadena that he spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro. The two met while hiking Eaton Canyon. Of her he wrote, "I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her...her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild."

With the help of Dolly's proofreading and copy editing, Grey gradually improved his writing. His first magazine article, "A Day on the Delaware", a human-interest story about a Grey brothers’ fishing expedition, was published in the May 1902 issue of Recreation magazine. Elated by selling the article, Grey offered reprints to patients in his waiting room. In writing, Grey found temporary escape from the harshness of his life and his demons. "Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is." By this time, he had given up baseball.

Grey read Owen Wister’s great Western novel The Virginian. After studying its style and structure in detail, he decided to write a full-length story. Grey had difficulties in writing his first novel, Betty Zane (1903). When it was rejected by Harper & Brothers, he lapsed into despair. The novel dramatized the heroism of an ancestor who had saved Fort Henry. He self-published it, perhaps with funds provided by his wife Dolly or his brother R. C.'s wealthy girlfriend Reba Smith. From the beginning, vivid description was the strongest aspect of his writing.

After attending a lecture in New York in 1907 by Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, western hunter and guide who had co-founded Garden City, Kansas, Grey arranged for a mountain lion-hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He brought along a camera to document his trips and prove his adventures. He also began the habit of taking copious notes, not only of scenery and activities but of dialogue. His first two trips were arduous, but Grey learned much from his compatriot adventurers. He gained the confidence to write convincingly about the American West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him. He wrote, "Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work."

Upon returning home in 1909, Grey converted his experiences into a new book, The Last of the Plainsmen, describing the adventures of Buffalo Jones. Harper’s editor Ripley Hitchcock rejected it, the fourth work in a row. He told Grey, "I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction." Grey wrote dejectedly, "I don’t know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want...I am full of stories and zeal and fire...yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false". The book was later published by Outing magazine, which provided Grey some satisfaction. Grey next wrote a series of magazine articles and juvenile novels.

With the birth of his first child pending, Grey felt compelled to complete his next novel and his first Western, The Heritage of the Desert. He wrote it in four months in 1910. It quickly became a bestseller. Grey took his next work to Hitchcock again; this time Harper published his work, an historical romance in which Mormon characters were of central importance. Grey continued to write popular novels about Manifest Destiny, the conquest of the Old West, and the behavior of men in elemental conditions.

Two years later Grey produced his best-known book, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), his all-time best-seller, and one of the most successful Western novels of all. Hitchcock rejected it, but Grey took his manuscript directly to the vice president of Harper, who accepted it. As Zane Grey had become a household name, after that, Harper eagerly received all his manuscripts. Other publishers caught on to the commercial potential of the Western novel. Max Brand and Ernest Haycox were among the most notable of other authors of Westerns. Grey's publishers paired his novels with some of the best illustrators of the time, including N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Douglas Duer, Herbert W. Dunton, W. H. D. Koerner, and Charles Russell.

Grey had the time and money to engage in his first and greatest passion: fishing. From 1918 until 1932, he was a regular contributor to Outdoor Life magazine. As one of its first celebrity writers, he began to popularize big-game fishing. Several times he went deep-sea fishing in Florida to relax and to write in solitude. Although he commented that, “the sea, from which all life springs, has been equally with the desert my teacher and religion,” Grey was unable to write a great sea novel. He felt the sea soothed his moods, reduced his depressions, and gained him the opportunity to harvest deeper thoughts:


The lure of the sea is some strange magic that makes men love what they fear. The solitude of the desert is more intimate than that of the sea. Death on the shifting barren sands seems less insupportable to the imagination than death out on the boundless ocean, in the awful, windy emptiness. Man’s bones yearn for dust.

Over the years, Grey spent part of his time traveling and the rest of the year wrote from the base of his adventures. Unlike writers who could write every day, Grey would have dry spells and then sudden bursts of energy, in which he could write as much as 100,000 words in a month. He encountered fans in most places. He kept a cabin on the Rogue River in Oregon. Other excursions took him to Washington state and Wyoming.




From 1923 to 1930, he spent a few weeks a year at his cabin on the Mogollon Rim, in Central Arizona. After years of abandonment and decay, the cabin was restored in 1966 by Bill Goettl, a Phoenix air conditioning magnate, and was opened to the public as a free-of-charge museum. The Dude Fire destroyed the cabin in 1990. It was later reconstructed 25 miles away in the town of Payson.

During the 1930s, Grey continued to write, but the Great Depression hurt the publishing industry. His sales fell off and he found it more difficult to sell serializations. Having avoided the stock market crash, he continued to earn royalty income. In the 1930s, nearly half of the film adaptations of his novels were made.

From 1925 to his death in 1939, Grey traveled more and further from his family. He became interested in exploring unspoiled lands, particularly the islands of South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia. He thought Arizona was beginning to be overrun by tourists and speculators. Near the end of his life, Grey looked into the future and wrote:


The so-called civilization of man and his works shall perish from the earth, while the shifting sands, the red looming walls, the purple sage, and the towering monuments, the vast brooding range show no perceptible change.

Controversy and critics
The more books Grey sold, the more the established critics, such as Heywood Broun and Burton Rascoe, attacked him. They claimed his depictions of the West were too fanciful, too violent, and not faithful to the moral realities of the frontier. They thought his characters unrealistic and much larger-than-life. Broun stated that “the substance of any two Zane Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp.” T. K. Whipple praised a typical Grey novel as a modern version of the ancient Beowulf saga, “a battle of passions with one another and with the will, a struggle of love and hate, or remorse and revenge, of blood, lust, honor, friendship, anger, grief—all of a grand scale and all incalculable and mysterious.” But he goes on to criticize Grey’s writing, “His style, for example, has the stiffness which comes from an imperfect mastery of the medium. It lacks fluency and facility.” In truth, as far as veracity was concerned, Grey relied on first-hand experience, careful note-taking, and considerable research. Despite his great popular success and fortune, Grey read the reviews and sometimes became paralyzed by negative emotions after critical ones.

In 1923 a reviewer called Grey's "moral ideas...decidedly askew". Grey reacted with a 20-page treatise "My Answer to the Critics". He defended his intentions to produce great literature in the setting of the Old West. He suggested that critics should ask his readers what they think of his books, and noted actor and fan John Barrymore as an example. Dolly warned him against publishing the treatise, and he retreated from a public confrontation.

His novel The Vanishing American (1925), first serialized in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1922, started a heated debate. People recognized its Navajo hero as patterned after the great athlete Jim Thorpe. Grey portrayed the struggle of the Navajo to preserve their identity and culture against corrupting influences of the white government and of missionaries. This viewpoint enraged religious groups. Grey contended, "I have studied the Navaho Indians for twelve years. I know their wrongs. The missionaries sent out there are almost everyone mean, vicious, weak, immoral, useless men." To have the book published, Grey agreed to some structural changes. With this book, Grey completed the most productive period of his writing career, having laid out most major themes, character types, and settings.

His Wanderer of the Wasteland is his thinly disguised autobiography. One of his books, “Tales of the Angler’s El Dorado, New Zealand”, helped establish the Bay of Islands in New Zealand as a premier game fishing area. Several of his later writings were based in Australia.


Fishing
Grey co-founded the "Porpoise Club" with his friend, Robert H. Davis of Munsey's Magazine, to popularize the sport of hunting of dolphins and porpoises. They made their first catch off of Seabright, New Jersey on September 21, 1912, where they harpooned and then reeled in a bottlenose dolphin.

Grey's son Loren claims in the introduction to Tales of Tahitian Waters that Zane Grey fished on average 300 days a year through his adult life. Grey and his brother R.C. were frequent visitors to Long Key, Florida, where they helped to establish the Long Key Fishing Club, built by Henry Morrison Flagler and was its president from 1917 to 1920. He pioneered the fishing of Boohoo fish (sailfish), and there is a Zane Grey Creek there [1].

Grey indulged his interest in fishing with visits to Australia and New Zealand. He first visited New Zealand in 1926 and caught several large fish of great variety, including a mako shark, a ferocious fighter which presented a new challenge. Grey established a base at Otehei Bay, Urupukapuka Island in the Bay of Islands, which became a magnet for the rich and famous and wrote many articles in international sporting magazines highlighting the uniqueness of New Zealand fishing which has produced heavy-tackle world records for the major billfish, striped marlin, black marlin, blue marlin and broadbill. A lodge and camp were established at Otehei Bay in 1927 called the Zane Grey Sporting Club. He held numerous world records during this time and invented the teaser, a hookless bait that is still used today to attract fish. Grey made three further fishing trips to New Zealand. The second was January to April 1927, the third December 1928 to March 1929, and the last December 1932 to February 1933. All these trips are recorded in books by Grey himself, or his son, Romer Zane Grey, or by his brother Reddy Grey.

Grey fished out of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, for many summers and set a world record for the largest blue-fin tuna on August 24, 1924 when he caught one weighing 758 pounds.

Grey also helped establish deep-sea sport fishing in New South Wales, Australia, particularly in Bermagui, New South Wales, which is famous for Marlin fishing. Patron of the Bermagui Sport Fishing Association for 1936 and 1937, Grey set a number of world records, and wrote of his experiences in his book "An American Angler in Australia".

From 1928 on, Grey was a frequent visitor to Tahiti. He fished the surrounding waters several months at a time and maintained a permanent fishing camp at Vairao. He claimed that these were the most difficult waters he had ever fished, but from these waters he also took some of his most important records, such as the first marlin over 1,000 pounds.

Grey had built a getaway home in Santa Catalina Island, California, which now serves as the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel. Avid fisherman as he was, he served as president of the Catalina's exclusive fishing club, the Tuna Club of Avalon.


Death
Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939, at his home in Altadena, California. He was interred at the Union Cemetery in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania.

Usually with

Noah Beery Sr.
Noah Beery Sr.
(13 films)
Jack Holt
Jack Holt
(13 films)
Randolph Scott
Randolph Scott
(11 films)
Guy Oliver
Guy Oliver
(11 films)
Adolph Zukor
Adolph Zukor
(10 films)
Source : Wikidata

Filmography of Zane Grey (91 films)

Display filmography as list

Actor

White Death, 1h21
Genres Comedy, Adventure, Romance
Themes Films about animals, Seafaring films, Transport films, Films about sharks
Actors Zane Grey
Roles self
Rating58% 2.923312.923312.923312.923312.92331
Zane Grey bets he can catch a fish bigger than one he sees at Watsons Bay. He hears about a large shark, nicknamed "white death", terrorising the Queensland coast and goes to catch it. He is thwarted by the comic attempts of Newton Smith, a representative of the Wallanga Branch of Fish Protectors, to persuade Grey not to harm fish. There is also a romance between two young people. Eventually Grey manages to catch the shark.

Director

Heritage of the Desert, 1h
Directed by Henry Hathaway, Harold Shumate, Zane Grey
Origin USA
Genres Western
Actors Randolph Scott, Sally Blane, David Landau, J. Farrell MacDonald, Gordon Westcott, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams
Rating58% 2.9072652.9072652.9072652.9072652.907265
Based on the novel Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey, the film is about a rancher whose spread includes the only way out of the valley where an outlaw is hiding a huge herd of stolen cattle. When the outlaw decides to challenge the rancher's claim to the land, the rancher stays one step ahead of him and hires a surveyor to remap and confirm the property lines.

Scriptwriter

Rise of the Lonestar Ranger
Genres Thriller, Action, Western
Actors Jason Patric, Danny Trejo, Rose McGowan, Keith David, Martin Copping, Mark Boone Junior
Roles Novel

Buck Duane inherited his legendary father's skill with a gun as well as his knack for finding trouble. Attacked by a jealous rival over a girl, Buck defends himself and is forced to live as an outlaw, constantly on the run from the black and white justice of the Texas Rangers. But when he seeks redemption by rescuing an enslaved Indian girl from a vicious criminal and his gang of outlaws, he's pushed into further violence, and the understanding that he may be no better than the worst of them. As penance for his crimes and the deaths he's caused, Buck agrees to give himself over to service in the Texas Rangers, working in constant peril as a sanctioned vigilante. He lives as an outlaw in order to root them out, dealing justice and vengeance for his dead friends and all the weak and helpless folk of Texas.
Riders of the Purple Sage, 1h38
Directed by Charles Haid
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Romance, Western
Actors Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Henry Thomas, G. D. Spradlin, Bob L. Harris, Robin Tunney
Roles Novel
Rating61% 3.099083.099083.099083.099083.09908
Jim Lassiter erre de ville en ville à la recherche de l'homme qui a conduit sa sœur au suicide. En roulant vers un col de montagne, il voit une héritière, Jane Withersteen, harcelée par des voyous et intervient pour l'aider. Une secte religieuse veut que Jane épouse leur chef, Deacon Tull, afin qu'ils puissent devenir propriétaires de ses terres. Lorsqu'il intervient pour aider, Lassister commence lentement à croire qu'un membre de cette secte est l'homme qu'il recherche.
The Maverick Queen, 1h30
Directed by Joseph Kane
Origin USA
Genres Western
Actors Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Scott Brady, Wallace Ford, Mary Murphy, Howard Petrie
Roles Novel
Rating58% 2.9490252.9490252.9490252.9490252.949025
Libéré après trois ans de prison, Jeff Younger semble vouloir rejoindre la horde sauvage menée par Butch Cassidy et Sundance Kid.
Robbers' Roost, 1h23
Directed by Sidney Salkow
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Action, Romance, Western
Actors George Montgomery, Richard Boone, Bruce Bennett, Peter Graves, Warren Stevens, William Hopper
Roles Story
Rating59% 2.953042.953042.953042.953042.95304
This script must be run from the command line
Red Canyon
Red Canyon (1949)
, 1h22
Directed by George Sherman
Origin USA
Genres Western
Actors Ann Blyth, Howard Duff, George Brent, Edgar Buchanan, John McIntire, Chill Wills
Roles Novel
Rating61% 3.095093.095093.095093.095093.09509
Lin Shoane, un cow boy solitaire, tombe amoureux de Lucy Bostel, la fille d'un éleveur de chevaux. Mais ce dernier soupçonne Lin d'être le fils d'un voleur…
Gunfighters, 1h27
Directed by George Waggner
Origin USA
Genres Documentary, Action, Western
Actors Randolph Scott, Barbara Britton, Bruce Cabot, Charley Grapewin, John Miles, Steven Geray
Roles Novel
Rating62% 3.1411553.1411553.1411553.1411553.141155
Trying to put his life as a gunfighter behind him, Brazos Kane goes off to join old pal Bob Tyrell at the Inskip ranch, only to see him gunned down by an unseen shooter.
Under the Tonto Rim, 1h1
Directed by Lew Landers
Origin USA
Genres Action, Western
Actors Tim Holt, Lex Barker, Nanette June "Nan" Leslie, Tom Keene, Robert Clarke, Carol Forman
Roles Novel
Rating62% 3.138893.138893.138893.138893.13889
A cowboy goes undercover to get the gang who killed his driver.
Thunder Mountain
Directed by Lew Landers
Origin USA
Genres Action, Romance, Western
Actors Tim Holt, Martha Hyer, Steve Brodie, Jason Robards Sr., Harry Woods, Harry Harvey, Sr.
Roles Novel
Rating62% 3.1424253.1424253.1424253.1424253.142425
A cowboy fights against crooks trying to control his land.
West of the Pecos, 1h6
Directed by Edward Killy
Origin USA
Genres Action, Western
Actors Robert Mitchum, Barbara Hale, Thurston Hall, Rita Corday, Russell Hopton, Bill Williams
Roles Novel
Rating60% 3.0465253.0465253.0465253.0465253.046525
Colonel Lambreth's health is poor, so daughter Rill persuades him to leave his Chicago meat-packing business behind and move to their Texas cattle ranch. Her fiance, lawyer Clyde Corbin, stays behind.