Customer Reviews

Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women

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Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women is a superbly integrated account of one of America's most popular authors of the western novel. Soundly documented and a seminal piece of biographical scholarship by Thomas H. Pauly (Professor of English, University of Delaware) fans of Zane Grey will learn that he was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball, an unhappy dentist, and took up writing at the age of thirty. His personal life was as colorful as any of his novels which made him the most successful American author of the 1920s, a popularizer of hunting and fishing, an early conservationist and wilderness protection advocate, and a significant figure in the early development of the film industry. He became a world traveler and a man whose marriage was critical to his literary success. But his domestic relationship was stressed by long separations, deep depressions, and multiple affairs with women. Enthusiastically recommended reading, Zane Grey is an impressive biography of a complicated and multifaceted man that is as engaging and entertaining as it is informed and informative.

Without the journals and letters which the Gray Estate has allowed Professor Pauly to peruse and quote, ZANE GREY: HIS LIFE might never have been written. They help to deepen, immeasurably, our appreciation of Grey's peculiarly American character.

In so many ways his American-ness is absolute. The zest for living, the expansive nature, the hail fellow well met sportsman side, his relations with women, especially with Dolly, his long-suffering wife--a woman he couldn't live with, yet couldn't live without. In one letter she notes that they had spent 7 days together in the whole of the past 12 months. Grey's traveling begins taking manic proportions shortly before the First World War, and continues for another 25 years, during which time he spends great fortunes on living it up and doing some world class angling. One yacht alone cost $300,000, in the midst of the Depression, plunging him finally into what amounted to them as abject poverty. Dolly couldn't even afford a movie ticket, she was scrimping so much.

Gray was a handsome man, the photos in the book revealing a big, strapping he-man type whom Harrison Ford might have played in earlier days. He seems to have cut right through the Gordian knot of Victorian prudery and found carnal love right away. Pauly's book makes one wonder if sexual freedom wasn't practiced on a much wider scale back in the day than we had previously imagined.

Pauly's big find is that Grey spent most of his writing life cheating on Dolly more or less openly, and she turned a blind eye, sometimes a condescending one, to his wild private life. He had the "decency" to bring his women on his months long excursions, whether to Rainbow Bridge or to Tahiti. They were hired as secretaries perhaps, but somehow wound up in his bed straightaway, posing for pornographic photos, hundreds of them (none of which are reproduced in the book). Apparently Grey was addicted to porn. Professor Pauly is a little at sea with this thundering herd of women and lacks the novelistic background which might have helped us tell them apart, for the most part. However one or two of them jump out from the pack, particularly the would-be writers among them who hoped that the famous Zane Grey would help them sell their work. He would--but only after he signed it with his own name and for his trouble he'd pocket 85 per cent of the proceeds.

This cheating and petty larceny and the wasteful spending are all symptoms of an underlying depression, or so it seems. He often felt his reasons for living slipping away. There was always a bigger silver marlin over the next horizon. "Driven" isn't the word for it!

Pauly gets so caught up in the drama of the decline and fall of the great Western writer, that he forgets to include any material that would interest us in Grey's novels, most of which, he convinces us, are inferior dribble. Book after book is disappointing, but there must have been a few good books perhaps early on? For a critical biography, this one is all too critical!

This is the most information I've ever seen on Zane Grey anywhere. He certainly was not like any of the characters he created. Apparently a charismatic man, but rather self-centered. After he had 3 children with his wife, he stopped spending any time with her or the children - his younger son remembers spending only one full day with his father in his entire youth. Grey took a series of mistresses with him on his yearly travels - and wrote to his wife about them!!! And told her he loved her and that she understood him better than anyone!
There is a good bit of well researched info about his youth and about his life. I enjoyed reading this book and finding out more about Grey's life. If you have enjoyed reading either his Westerns or his books on fishing and the outdoor life, this book wiil give you a "behind the scenes" look at those stories.

Just when you think you know all about a person, another author comes along and with his tome, tells you even more. Thomas Pauly's well-researched biography of Zane Grey is one of those books. From his birth in Zanesville OH in 1872 through his death in 1939, Pauly sticks to the subject--Zane Grey--and his most unusual matrimonial arrangement with his wife Dolly. Using newly researched material, one learns more about the life of Zane Grey, who was an author, supremely gifted to write about flora and fauna and mountains and desert and waterfalls and giant trees that even today makes you want to go to the South West desert just to see the colors, then winds a story around his descriptions of the West, complete with knights-errant and damsels in distress, set in the old (and sometimes modern) Western United States. Pauly's book takes you into the life of this very complicated person who was both snobbish and insecure at the same time. You will meet his wife Lina, without whom he may have never been successful, his girlfriends he took with him on his western and fishing trips, even while married ("inamorata" Dolly called some of them she knew and liked) also without whom he may have never been successful, his brother, his collegiate friends, his children, publishers, fishing companions, baseball teammates, movie moguls, conservationists, buffalo hunters and breeders--all played a part in his life. Due partly to his propensity to write letters to Dolly when not at home (which was practically never) Grey's story can only be told by an author willing to take the time to put it all together. Pauly does exactly that, working five years to gather his facts and separate them from fiction and folklore, common to many of Grey's earlier biographers. Pauly pulls no punches, either. He tells it like it was. If you have read one Zane Grey book in your life, do not read this book. If you have read two, you are hooked, like Grey's big deep sea catches, and you will need this book to help you understand one of America's most popular authors. And if you think you already know much about Zane Grey, you ain't read nothin' yet...

Pauly brings Zane Grey alive for me in the many pages of documentation, research and quoted letters. I knew Zane was a prolific, wealthy (most of the time), respected writer but I never knew about his over-spending, mistreatment/neglect of his wife and family, and his many lady friends; but at least he wasn't a gambler (except with boats and fishing), smoker, wife-beater or heavy drinker. His primary weakness seems that he was always looking over the horizon for his next quest, another world-record, and maybe score another woman; but he had so much already with his faithful, supportive wife, healthy children and a talent that could turn out page after page of creditable prose. I believe the author should follow-up with more detail about the fall-out behind this man. He touches briefly on the children, the women, etc., but what happens when a person becomes totally ego-centric and disregards the feelings and emotions of others? A good book - a true-to-life glimpse at one of our important writers...

Having never read a Zane Grey novel, I don't know what led me to this book. Biography is my preferred genre, and the "adventures" part promised a good story. I think I dismissed "his women" as maybe something about his bachelor life or maybe some Annie Oakley types he met out west.

Was I surprised! I think his contemporary fans (as I envision them) would have been shocked. Pauly spares the details, but the picture is clear. Their lives with Grey belie their photos, which show these women as wholesome and modern for our times and theirs. Grey's condemnations of "jazz age morals" certainly helped to build his image (or brand) and the hypocrisy was a well covered trail. Pauly says this was only knowable in the last 10 years.

The early letters of wife Dolly are almost too painful to read. She deserves a bio of her own. She apparently took stock of her position and found fulfillment in raising children, business (a bank president!) and travel.

Grey was clearly intelligent, remarkably handsome and athletic. His flexibility is exemplified in transitions from dentistry to baseball, to roping mountain lions, to writing, to pioneering in the film industry, and inventing his own reel for sport fishing. He emerged from childhood with emotional and financial needs.

Pauly does a good job in presenting all of this. The book details what is known of his childhood and early adulthood, how he came to travel west, the novels, the movies, the outdoore life. Pauly has piqued my interest in the Zane Grey novel... perhaps I'll try one.

This book contains spurious research... the author was only able to examine records briefly... give us a break! He is factually inaccurate in many areas, i.e., birthplace of Lillian Wilhelm Smith. The author inaccurately copied information from Donna Ashworth's well-researched book on the topic.

If this clown is teaching somewhere, students beware!

Fran Elliott
Sedona, AZ