Zane Grey

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.