Fiction · 1903
Betty Zane
On the Ohio frontier in 1782, with Fort Henry under siege by British-allied Native American forces and its store of gunpowder gone, someone has to run unarmed across open ground, through gunfire, to fetch more from a cabin outside the walls — and it is Betty Zane, sixteen years old, who volunteers, because losing a woman to a stray shot costs the garrison less than losing one of its few remaining men.
Zane Grey based his 1903 debut novel on his own family history: Betty Zane was his own great-grand-aunt, and the siege of Fort Henry — the last major engagement of the American Revolution — a real event he had grown up hearing about. Self-published because no established house would take it, Betty Zane sold well enough to convince Grey to leave dentistry for writing full-time, the first step toward his becoming, within a decade, America's best-selling author of the western.
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About the author
1872–1939 · Modern
Zane Grey (1872–1939) was born in Zanesville, Ohio, and trained as a dentist at the University of Pennsylvania, practicing in New York City until 1904. He self-published his first novel, Betty Zane, that year, and left dentistry for good after The Spirit of the Border (1905) sold well; Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) made him the best-selling western writer in America, and Desert Gold followed the next year. He wrote more than eighty books in all, several published after his death in Altadena, California, and did more than any other writer to define the western as a genre.
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