Riders of the Purple Sage, published in 1912, has been called the most popular western novel of all time. Zane Grey's sixth book and first bestseller, Riders is set in the mysterious canyon country of southern Utah during the turbulent 1870s and portrays a conflict between Mormon and non-Mormon settlers over the possession of land. The novel questions the right of a religion to tyrannize its followers and deprive them of freedom in the name of good. The rugged landscape the novel inhabits is more than a backdrop for the action. Villains and heroes both try to use the stone labyrinth to their advantage, but it is the landscape's power and majesty that dictate the final result. What is both shocking and fascinating about Riders, when read today, is the negative characterization of the Mormon religion. Even in 1912, the original publisher had misgivings about bringing out a book so bluntly negative about the Mormon faith. Also intriguing is the fact that Zane Grey wrote two other books in the same period that contained positive portrayals of Mormonism.

Zane Grey was larger than life. As Jane Tompkins wrote in her book West of Everything; The Inner Life of Westerns, for Grey, "Writing was not just a matter of representing deeds of valour, but of performing them." When he was not writing, he was hunting and fishing. His explorations, often on horseback with pack trains, took him into some of the most remote locations in America. This was an era when writers felt they needed to inspire their prose with first-hand, even high-risk experiences, and Grey was a model of the approach. All of America watched to see what he would do and write aboutnext.

Through the 1920s, Zane Grey's books were consistently on American bestsellers lists. At the root of his success was his absolute belief that American nostalgia for the frontier, and for a return to bygone values, was more powerful than the enticements of urban stories about an increasingly industrialized America. This choice meant that the endorsement of the literary elite would not come his way within his lifetime, but a much larger success and a deeper reverence from ordinary readers did. It is estimated that over one hundred and thirty million copies of Zane Grey's books have been sold worldwide.

Zane Grey didn't begin his writing career until he was almost thirty. Born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1872, he was given the name Pearl Zane Gray. His father, a dentist, urged his son to follow him into the profession, but Zane was more interested in sport and the outdoors. A promising pitcher, he was once booed in victory for throwing too many curve balls. He earned a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and did in fact use the opportunity to study dentistry. He began his dentist's practice in New York City in 1896, but by 1902 was tired of it. It was then he began to write. His first publication was a fishing story called "A Day on the Delaware." The next project, a trilogy of historical novels rooted in his mother's family history in Ohio, began with the self-published Betty Zane in 1903. He had by then changed his name from Pearl Zane Gray to Zane Grey.

The turning point in Zane Grey's career coincided with his marriage to Lina Elise "Dolly" Roth in 1906. Their honeymoon trip to California included a stop at the Grand Canyon and a pack trip to the canyon's depths. This was Grey's first glimpse of the arid and sculpted country that would be the lasting inspiration for his western novels.

Grey returned to Arizona a year later, after having met colorful westerner Buffalo Jones in New York City. Jones invited Grey to visit his remote Arizona ranch, where he was crossbreeding buffalo with domestic cattle. The group rendezvoused in Flagstaff, where Grey was introduced to the impressive Mormon pioneer Jim Emett and several Mormon cowboys and wild horse trackers. Grey was the only non-Mormon in the party, so the 180-mile journey represented a chance to learn about that mysterious religion, as well as the landscape and lore of the country. One of many highlights for Grey was taking part in Buffalo Jones's specialty of treeing and roping mountain lions. The night the two had met in New York, a crowd Jones was lecturing had hooted him down for saying he could capture live cougars with a rope. The New Yorkers didn't believe it. Part of Grey's purpose in Arizona was to witness the practice, then write about it, so that Jones could be vindicated.

Though Zane Grey would return to northern Arizona several times, it was his nature to be most impressed by a place on first immersion. His 1907 exploring party crossed the Colorado River at Lee's Ferry, which Jim Emett operated, then traveled the country north of the Grand Canyon. This journey through the high desert known as the Arizona Strip, and another pack trip with guide Al Doyle into the Navajo country in 1911, provided the images, characters, and ideas for many books to come.

Four of Zane Grey's early books portrayed Mormons in lead roles. The Last of the Plainsmen (1908) was the promised nonfiction portrayal of his 1907 journey with Buffalo Jones and Jim Emett. Grey dove back into that material immediately and wrote the novel The Heritage of the Desert (1910). Heritage featured a thinly veiled Jim Emett as the noble Mormon August Naab. Two years later, Grey was back with a second Mormon novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, but the tone had entirely changed. Now Mormons were the villains. A third book, The Rainbow Trail, written in 1915, and set in 1889, describes a Mormonism changed by opposition and the passing of a hardened generation. Grey's non-Mormon protagonist in this sequel is willing to look at practices like polygamy with a more tolerant view.

Some have suggested that the three novels represent changes in Grey's attitude toward Mormons during the period he was writing about them. When he wrote The Heritage of the Desert, he was trying to present the general public with a view of Mormonism that would show the religion's good points and dampen anti-Mormon sentiment. But in the process of learning about the religion, Grey himself found things he did not like, and these found expression in Riders of the Purple Sage. In the third novel, The Rainbow Trail, Grey's character Shefford rationalizes and forgives some of the traits of Mormonism that Lassiter, the hero of Riders, had detested.

Another perspective on this shift from a positive portrayal of Mormonism in Heritage to a negative portrayal in Riders is that it had to do with marketing. A letter from Grey to a Mormon guide in Arizona attempts to excuse the anti-Mormon content in Riders by pointing out how much worse Mormons were being treated in other publications. Grey also suggested to this Mormon friend that another positive portrayal of Mormons, in such an anti-Mormon climate, could cost him money. The Heritage of the Desert had been a breakthrough for Grey in the sense that a prestigious publisher, Harper and Brothers, had published it. Now he needed a financial success to forever answer the question of whether writing could support his family. The choice of an anti-Mormon message in Riders appealed to one million readers in the book's first year, and Zane Grey's career was airborne.

In fashioning his Mormon villains for Riders and deciding on their evil practices, it is likely that Zane Grey was influenced by stories about the Danites, a Mormon defense organization formed in response to violent acts against Mormons in Missouri. Mormon history states that the church's founder Joseph Smith disbanded the Danites as soon as he heard of their activities. A popular belief among non-Mormons was that the Danites were still active. In 1838, at the peak of the conflict between Mormons and non-Mormons in Missouri, the state governor issued an "Extermination Order" against Mormons. The result was the Church's removal to Illinois. That same year, 1839, Joseph Smith introduced the contentious practice of polygamy. Many in the general public already hated Mormons for their deviation from standard Christianity. Now they seized upon polygamy as more just cause for their hatred.

In 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother were assassinated by a mob in an Illinois jail. Brigham Young, Smith's successor, led most of the Mormons to Salt Lake in 1846. The most grisly instance of Mormons taking revenge for all they had endured occurred in Utah in 1857 and is known as "The Mountain Meadows Massacre." Though many conflicting versions of this story exist, it is believed that Mormons and Paiute Indians killed all but seventeen of a caravan of 137 California-bound Missourians.

Given the need for a powerful villain to increase the suspense in any western action novel, it probably made sense to Zane Grey to portray Mormon goodness in one book, and Mormon tyranny in another, rather than mix the two. He did not go against his own beliefs in either book, but emphasized one side of what he felt about Mormonism in one, then shifted to the opposite pole of his feelings in the other. It is well known that Zane Grey disliked fanaticism, in any religion, and his goal in Riders was probably to repudiate tyrannical practices in all religions, not just Mormonism.

Each of the main characters in Riders represents a moral position, and the plot is an argument among those positions. Jane Withersteen, a Mormon, is kind and good, and believes that all violence is wrong. Her male counterpart is the action hero, Lassiter, who is portrayed as without religion. He believes in the power of guns and the survival of the fittest, and in the beginning of the book he is fueled only by a desire for revenge. Elder Tull, the villain, is pure fanatical tyranny. He uses the tenets of Mormonism as an excuse for greed and violence: for coveting Jane and her property and for unmotivated attacks against gentiles. Throughout the novel, the attraction between Jane and Lassiter is obvious, but belief keeps them apart. Finally, when an orphaned child in their care becomes "a religion" to Lassiter, the gunman mellows. While Jane is pulled and driven away from Mormonism, Lassiter is drawn towards an instinctual pantheism, where God exists in children and in nature. The suggestion is that Jane and Lassiter will form a union beyond the novel's close.

The landscape of southern Utah is presented as haunting, beautiful, frightening, and labyrinthine. The labyrinth can be a place where you lose yourself or where you find protection from your enemies. A man with the power to survive and the sense to appreciate where he is might even find Eden there. In Riders, a giant stone called Balancing Rock has the capacity to fall and permanently block the wild world from the tame. Though Zane Grey lived in California and was drawn to the excitement of Hollywood, he had a competing yen for life in an undisturbed wilderness. It also bothered him that so many wild places he had included in his books had become objects of curiosity on their way to being tourist destinations, partly because of the notoriety he had given them. Balancing Rock is a powerful symbol of yearning to escape irreversibly into nature, while leaving society behind.

Riders of the Purple Sage has been adapted for film many times, the first version made by Fox in 1918. Grey subsequently started his own film company, which he sold to Jesse L. Laskey, the founder of Paramount Studios. Laskey's Paramount turned many of Zane Grey's novels into movies, and Grey was very satisfied with the respect shown to both him and his books in the process. But Paramount could not film Riders of the Purple Sage because Fox retained its film rights.

Fox had two things Grey disliked: an adherence to the star system and a tendency to change the plots of books they adapted for screen. Fox remade Riders in 1925, with Tom Mix in the starring role of Lassiter, who was now a Texas ranger seeking revenge on a lawyer. The Mormon plot was gone. In the Depression years, Fox made Riders a third time with their marquee star, George O'Brien, in the Lassiter role. The fourth remake was released in 1941, after Grey's death, with George Montgomery as Lassiter. The most recent motion-picture version of Riders aired on the Turner Network in 1997, starring Amy Madigan and Ed Harris. In this version, the religious zealotry of the villains is back.

Zane Grey died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1939. After his death, he remained a legendary figure, but a shift in literary taste toward urbanism, gritty realism, and ambivalent values made the romantic vision in his novels seem dated. Applauded in his day for his efforts to achieve accuracy, Grey came in for criticism on that ground as well. Blake Allmendinger, an American academic and writer from a Colorado ranch background, has pointed out that, except for showy moments of cowboy work such as bronco-busting, there is little in Zane Grey's novels about what a normal cowboy did on an average day.

Other critics and historians of American literature, such as Duke University professor and author Jane Tompkins, have re-examined the Zane Grey opus and found in it an important development in North American letters. Whether or not Zane Grey meets current literary tastes, he did create a genre, more or less by himself. Owen Wister's The Virginian is recognized as the first western, but one novel does not a genre make. By the time Zane Grey had written his fifty-six westerns the trail was tramped deep in the American psyche, for others, such as Louis L'Amour, to follow. One wonders if the literary stars of western writing today, authors like Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, would have directed their energies and talents toward the western if Zane Grey had not blazed the trail.

Since its first publication in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage has never been out of print. There is also an enduring quality in the Zane Grey style. Jane Tompkins describes it this way:

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 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.

Endurance was a quality that Zane Grey greatly admired, and one would imagine that the uninterrupted longevity of his best-loved book would please him greatly.

Fred Stenson is the author of thirteen books and two historical fictions: The Trade, an award-winning account of the Western fur trade, and Lightning, a 2003 novel about the American and Canadian open range. He is the director of the Wired Writing Studio at The Banff Center in Alberta, Canada.