Customer Reviews

Riders of the Purple Sage (MP3 CD)

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If you are not an aficionado of the Western novel but would like to sample the genre, then you should try one or more of the three great classics; Jack Schaefer's "Shane", Owen Wister's "The Virginian" , and this novel by Zane Grey. Of the three, "Shane" has the most literary merit and is the only one with claims to being great literature. "The Virginian" is often regarded as the first true representative of the genre, establishing as it does many of the great archetypal characters and incidents of Western myth, and "Riders of the Purple Sage" remains the best-selling Western.

"Riders" has two very remarkable features. The first is the surprising complexity and mythic depth of the story. There is for example, a Garden of Eden theme, with two of the characters isolated for an extended time in a lush wilderness. This is so strikingly like the Emil Zola novel "La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret" (The Abbe Mouret's Sin) that one wonders if Grey had read and been inspired by that work. Interwoven with this is an Oedipal theme. If all of this sounds a bit much for a cowboy yarn, I can only say that it really is all there.

The other remarkable thing about the book is its attitude toward the Mormon religion. The hero is an avowed "killer of Mormons". The LDS church is depicted as essentially brutal and tyrannical. This, I suppose, reflects a prejudice of the time, but I wonder how present-day members of that church regard this novel.

It has to be said that Grey is not a great writer and in particular, he cannot do dialogue. In fact, the dialogue in the first few pages is so appalling that I nearly gave up on the book there and then. However, I'm glad I stuck with it. It is such a fine and strange story and has such a wonderful sense of place.

Her father's death has left Jane Withersteen in possession of the richest land holding in the Cottonwoods, a Mormon village on the 1871 Utah frontier. Most importantly, Amber Spring runs through her property and so she controls the water supply that makes possible the rolling fields of purple sage. But now the Mormon church wants to gain contol of the spring by forcing an unwilling Jane to marry Elder Tull. They've been steadily increasing the pressure on her and as the novel opens, Tull and his henchmen have come to arrest Venters, the Gentile foreman on her ranch. Outnumbered and outgunned, Jane prays for deliverance. Just as Tull is about to whip Venters, a rider in black appears--Lassiter, the scourge of the Mormons.

Lassiter is an archetype of the mythic Western hero. In him we see the origins of both Shane and Ethan Edwards (from The Searchers, Amos in the novel)--a lone gunmen fighting for Justice, he has descended upon Mormon Utah with a vengeance, obsessively searching for the sister who was kidnapped by a Mormon proselytizer.

Jane takes him on as a ranch hand, but makes him swear to forsake violence. Inevitably (as in High Noon), events force her to release him from his oath.

Despite an extremely harsh view of Mormons, this is one of the truly great Westerns; a must read.

GRADE: A

In Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey takes the reader to the small Mormon town in Utah called Cottonwoods. The novel is set in the 1870's. The novel is centered on the life of Jane WIthersteen, whose father was the founder and center of the town. Jane faces many troubles in Cottonwoods. The main one is that her cattle have been stolen by Oldring and his gang. Another is that Jane is pressured by the townspeople because she allows Gentiles to live there. She is torn between her feelings and her religion until a stranger, Lassiter, comes riding into town searching for the answers to a secret that only Jane knows the answer to.

Jane is the main character in the book. This book is different because most westerns do not center around the life of a woman. Most westerns are focused on the rough, tough, cowboy who shoots people and lives on the edge to survive. Jane is different. Her father founded the town she lives in and she keeps the town going. She is like the head of the town. She owns almost everything in the town and the landscape around it. She is very wealthy and has no biases. She likes who she likes because of who they are, not what their religion is, like the rest of the town does. The town hates that she acts like that. Jane takes Lassiter in and answers his questions about the secret. I really like that the author uses a woman in this novel because it gives a whole different perspective to a western. Most westerns focus on the cowboy and his journeys, but this book focuses on a woman, Jane, throughout the book and the troubles she encounters living in the West. It gives us a perspective of what women may have been like in the West. It still has the rough, tough cowboy, but he is not the only focus in the book. There is more happening than just the journey of a cowboy.

This book was also a pleasure to read because it does a good job of describing the landscape around Cottonwoods and in the sage. Some westerns give the reader an idea of the landscape, but this book focuses on the landscape and uses it in the book. For instance, Venters travels into the sage and hides behind the rock and in holes in the mountains and terrain around him. The landscape is used throughout the book when the characters are faced with problems such as the one described above with Venters. The landscape helped to hide him. I think it was clever to bring the landscape in and use it as part of the story. Alot of westerns do not use the landscape, they just describe it to give the reader a setting and an idea of the landscape in the book.

The book is a typical western though, because Lassiter is a typical cowboy. He has a deep secret and is in search of answers to that secret. He is a stranger that comes riding into town. He sleeps in the sage under the stars and will not sleep inside. He is on a mission and is not going to let anything or anyone get in his way. Most westerns have the cowboy meet a woman as in this story.

Overall, I think this is a good book for all sorts of readers. Zane Grey is a good writer who includes aspects for all kinds of readers. Riders of the Purple Sage is an action pact, mystery solving, all around good book for anyone who is in the mood for a western.

Zane Grey is one of the best-known and most prolific writers in the Western genre. Riders of the Purple Sage is perhaps his most famous novel. And deservedly so. The story starts rather slowly by today's fiction standards, and has a meandering story line that leaves one wondering what the book is all about--or whether it's actually about anything particular at all. But then with Dickensian brilliance he weaves a series of seemingly unrelated tendrils into one complex, exciting, and satisfying conclusion.

Rich and beautiful Jane Withersteen has inherited her father's ranch and cattle herds on the Utah frontier border. She resists the demands of church elders to marry Tull, a fellow Mormon, instead showing interest in Gentile sage-rider Ventors. This insubordinate behavior causes high tension in the Mormon town of Cottonwoods, already edgy from an insurgence of Gentiles and years of cattle-rustling mayhem led by the legendary Oldring and his mysterious Masked Rider. At the moment that Mormon ire peaks over Jane's intransigence, Grey adds the catalyst to a chain reaction of violent drama: the arrival in Cottonwoods of Lassiter, the infamous Mormon-killing gunman. The plot plays out with plenty of surprising revelations on the true identity and intentions of the various parties.

Grey's style is heavy on scenic description, with almost redundant recitation of the virtues of the purple prairie. But the book has a classic, literary quality to it, something the genre sorely missed until Larry McMurtry brought it back with Lonesome Dove. And horse-lovers will appreciate Grey's knowledge and detailed rendering of everything equestrian. --Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake Up Dead.

Zane Grey was a fixture in American letters when it came to the Western. In fact, one might suggest that he invented the modern form of it (though, of course, there were writers of dime novel westerns before him, not to mention James Fenimore Cooper and his leatherstocking tales). But Grey certainly did someting memorable and lasting with the form, if this book is any measure. I had never read Grey before, so I picked this one up with some uncertainty. Thought I could not count myself well-read until I'd tried one of his books and this seemed to be the one with the most literary weight. It's certainly named well enough. As it happens, I enjoyed the book in the end, but have to admit that it is weak in a number of serious ways.

Set in Mormon Utah in the late 1800's, it's the tale of a young Mormon woman who is the sole heir of her father and owner of the substantial ranch he has left her. Because of the significance of her ranch and because she is a rather headstrong young woman, the Mormon elders feel it essential to rein her in and get her married into the fold as quickly as they can. One particular Mormon Elder, a man named Tull, has his eye on her especially, with the support of his mysterious Bishop. But Jane, pious as she is, demurs, recognizing that becoming one more of Tull's wives (in those days the Mormons were still taking several wives) will only strip her of her freedom and clout in the little community (which she has inherited along with her father's extensive ranch).

The story opens with Tull and his other pious brethren about to administer a sound thrashing to a young cowhand who has been working for the heroine, Jane Withersteen, and who Jane has been flirting with. Jane is powerless to prevent the beating and worse until the appearance, out of the hazy, distant horizon, of a man called Lassiter. Lassiter proves to be a hard sort and a known gunman with a special dislike for Mormons. His arrival proves salutary and the end of it is he stays on with Jane at the ranch while the cowhand heads out and the Mormons scatter, tails between their legs.

Jane sets out to convince Lassiter that not all Mormons are bad while the Mormon elders conspire to bring Jane down by scaring off all her Mormon and non-Mormon ranch hands. Meanwhile, the erstwhile cowhand (his name escapes me) stumbles onto the secret hide-out of the rustlers who have been robbing the honest folk in the area. There are lots of chases and hiding outs and some gun play. The cow hand finds his love in an unlikely place in the box canyon in which he holes up (hard to believe this man and his intended are together an entire week, feel the way they do about each other and yet never touch one another, but it was a simpler time then, wasn't it?), the gunman hangs around Jane who exerts her feminine wiles to get him to give up his guns before he can hurt anymore Mormons, and the Mormon elders continue their nefarious schemes to break Jane to the halter.

Thoughout it all, Lassiter seems oddly passive and inert for the deadly, single-minded gunman he is made out to be. One of the remarkable things about this book is the rich prose in which the landscape is surrealistically painted which gives it both its title and the feel that this is more than just a silly story about good guys and bad guys. And there's a strong sense of suppressed sexuality underlying the entire tale here as embodied in the highly visual rendering of the countryside, its canyons, its sage and its sky. The descriptiveness of the narrative is, however, somewhat repetitive and overdone as though apparently reflecting the turbulent emotions of the characters themselves, as though their innermost feelings are laid bare upon the landscape of their tale.

The ending is a bit melodramatic too and rather predictable, but, in all, I can see why this tale has the good name it's got. It's intriguing and enthralling (it kept me reading through to the end -- a harder thing these days as my eyes are not what they used to be and I have less patience than I once did for the fictional word). But in comparison with many other works which I have read and enjoyed, I had to conclude that this one is not quite in their league.

Using the amazon "five star" system, I usually reserve five stars for the really good to the great, four for the pretty damned good to the good, and three to the "good but" category. This one is thus a "three" on that measure since it was strongly enough written to carry me as a reader and interesting enough in its unexpectedly powerful use of language but, in the end, that very usage went over the top and slid into the dream-like purple of the sage in which the characters cavort. And the characterizations, themselves, are rather stilted, the tale kind of flat and just plain contrived. I think it's the underlying sexual energy in the writing which really carries the day. "Good but . . . "

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

There are two basic styles of English prose. One is that of Dashiell Hammett - short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters, short novels. The other basic style is that of Charles Dickens - long passages of minute, detailed description. Zane Grey wrote in this second style, and he did it very well indeed. The American West comes alive in the pages of this book, a true classic. Calling this "purple prose" is like calling the music of the Grateful Dead "boogie" - it's a putdown that doesn't really mean anything. (Incidentally, a Grateful Dead offshoot band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, was named after this book.) Just as Alice chased a rabbit into Wonderland, so Venters chases a rabbit into Surprise Valley. He discovers true spirituality in the natural world and in other people - not in organized, denominational religion. The theme of this novel is that tyrannical fanaticism - religious and/or political - is dangerous and wrong. Grey was not specifically anti-Mormon. In fact, some of his Mormon charactors were good people. He was against any religious system that was out of control in its lust for power. Think of todays' "religious right", or for that matter, Islamic extremism. Grey would have disliked both.

I love the freedom and the grandeur Zane Grey brought to even his shortest story, and while RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE is dated, you can practically smell the saguaro lingering on every page, like mold, except with a fresher scent. As many other reviewers have noticed, the book is rife with anti-Mormon sympathies and it sort of does for members of the Latter Day Saints what BIRTH OF A NATION does for black people--i.e., no favors. What will Mormons make of a story which casts one of them as the heroine and all the others as a bunch of low class, scurvy thieving swine with nothing better on their minds than "wiving" and basically swindling poor Jane out of her wonderful ranch in the Cottonwoods of Utah.

Instead Jabe winds up crossing the line and falling for a "Gentile," the cowboy Lassiter who wields a six shooter and rides like the wind. She abdicates her place in respectable society to become "infamous, notorious," as she sobs out on the purple plain, "a rustler's girl and nothing more."

The two of them share a common love for children and the West, which Lassiter tries to hide behind his mask of not caring a damn for any person, place, thing or religion. His cold, hard impassivity becomes a screen on which Jane projects her romantic and sexual feelings, which are echoed daily and nightly in Grey's remarkable prose, a splashy palette of colors and earth tones. It won't take you long to rip through this romantic thriller, but you too will be amazed by the sympathetic treatment Zane Grey gives to his heroine, even though she slips through the fingers of morality like a jet of clear sparkling water from the Cottonwood River. Her life of sin is not total debauchery however, for she remains chaste, and lets the landscape, especially its canyons, reveal her pulsating desires.

An excellent adventure of the Old West. Characters spring to life and you can just see, almost smell, the country Zane Grey is writing about. He has their actions and language down pat. This is far better than the earlier edited version which seemed to omit a lot of detail. Grey's best book by far in a group of fine western tales.

An incredible read! I never read the edited version, but I think I'll stick with these new uncut versions that are coming out.

Riders of the Purple Sage

I've just finished reading a Restored Edition of Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. It is one of a number of the Five Star Western Series released by Gale Publishing since 1996.
Riders of the Purple Sage is about a single woman, Jane Withersteen, whose father died and left her a large and prosperous ranch to manage and preserve. She is a devout Mormon in a Utah border community, and is expected to marry a prominent leader in that community although she doesn't love him. A young cowboy, Bern Venters, is a Gentile who works for Jane and actually is in love with her. The local leadership insists that Jane fire him and that he is to leave town. Suddenly there arrives a mysterious rider, Lassiter, who is obviously a hardened gunman and he comes to Venters rescue.
After the confrontation, when the confounded leaders are forced to leave, Lassiter reveals that he is on a quest to locate his long lost sister, who was kidnapped by Mormon evangelist years earlier, and her trail has led him here. It turns out that his sister was a friend of Jane's and she is actually buried on the ranch, but Jane refuses to tell Lassiter who it was that kidnapped her, although he suspects that Jane knows.
There are hair-raising adventures involving cattle rustlers and the powerful group of Mormon barons, who are determined to run Jane out of business if she persists in her refusal to marry the designated man.
Meanwhile, in his flight to escape from the local tyrants Bern discovers the rustlers lair in the canyons and rescues the ward of the head rustler, having been convinced earlier that she was one of his chief confederates.
Set in a wonderfully described, beautiful, southern Utah border country, it is a deeply satisfying story, which is guaranteed to keep you entertained for several evenings in any season of the year.
Zane Grey published his stories from 1910 till 1939. 109 of them were made into movies, a record that still stands. What happened is that many of his novels were crudely bowdlerized by heavy handed editors at Harper and others, and only now have many of the original manuscripts come to light. With the collaboration of Zane Grey's family, Gale Publishing is circulating them to a new generation of readers.
Zane Grey is a fine writer, and he describes multilayered and fascinatingly complex characters. The author explores the psychological motivations and emotional dimensions of his well drawn characters. He describes in an interesting and engaging way, the environment and surrounding scenery of the Old West. His plots are complex and twisted enough to keep the reader turning the pages to the very last page. And the ending is often a final surprise.

Gale Publishing provides hard backs and large print editions for libraries, but recently I have seen paper back editions in the bookstores.
I have also recently read: Shower of Gold, Cabin Gulch, and an older edition of a biography of George Washington, written just before Grey died in 1939.