Zane Grey: Riders of the Purple Sage

ZANE GREY, the bestselling author of sixty-five Western novels, is one of the most respected writers of Western fiction. His works have been translated into numerous languages and have been made into more than one hundred movies. 


Since its first publication in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage has never been out of print. 



Riders of the Purple Sage tells the story of Jane Withersteen, a young and devoutly religious Mormon woman caught between the persecution of religious zealots in her community seeking her land, her wealth, and her freedom to live as she wishes.


Set in Utah during the nineteenth century, Zane Grey questions the right of a religion to tyrannize its followers and deprive them of freedom in the name of good, and offers an unstinting critique on the practice of polygamy in the Old West. 

Then a mysterious gunslinger, Lassiter, rides into town... 



Lassiter is the original mythic Western hero. In him we see the unmistakable origins of every John Wayne, Clint Eastwood Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper movie in which a lone gunmen lays his life on the line, steeling himself for the final showdown with the pack of murderous villains.


“For sheer emotional force; for the capacity to get and keep his readers, absolutely, in his grip; for the power to be-there is no other word for it-thrilling, few practitioners of narrative prose can equal Zane Grey. Sometimes reading him is like being caught in a waterfall or a flood; you feel at the mercy of a natural force that cannot be emanating entirely from the page.”

—Jane Tompkins