Foreword: The Man Who Built the West
FOREWORD
Pearl Zane Grey (1872-1939) was the most-read American author of the early twentieth century, with fifty million copies of his novels sold during his lifetime and one hundred and twelve film adaptations made from his work. He is the man who built the American West — not the geographic West, which existed already, but the mythological West that lives in the popular imagination: the purple sage, the canyon walls, the lone horseman at sunset, the code of honor written not in law but in character.
This anthology collects all of Grey's public domain novels in one volume, arranged in approximate order of publication. It spans his full range — from the Ohio frontier historical fiction of the Betty Zane trilogy, through the great Colorado Plateau Westerns that made his reputation, to his WWI-era social commentary and his outdoor adventure non-fiction. Each novel is preceded by a brief editorial introduction placing it in context.
The illustrations throughout this volume are original works created by Source of Truth Publishing Co. using AI image generation, inspired by the tradition of early twentieth-century Western illustration — particularly the panoramic oils and action sketches of Frederic Remington and the dramatic compositions of the pulp Western magazine covers that Grey's own stories inspired. They are new creative works; the underlying texts remain in the public domain.
Zane Grey did not write timeless literature in the modernist sense. He wrote urgently necessary literature — stories for a country that had just closed its frontier and needed to understand what it had lost and what it might still recover. Read in that spirit, these novels remain as alive as the landscapes they describe.
— Jeffrey S. Thomann, Publisher Source of Truth Publishing Co. soretruth.com