Riders Of The Purple Sage

Zane Grey’s timeless novel will be staged as an opera.

- Jana Bommersbach

The famous purple sage of Western lore is made more dramatic by the red sandstone spires that dot Monument Valley, where Zane Grey rides below. His lyrical descriptions of this majestic site remind one of an Ed Mell painting, for example, Red Rock Cloud Drift (inset), which is why Arizona Opera chose to partner with the artist to present the visuals for its grand interpretation of Zane’s Riders of the Purple Sage novel. – ALL ZANE GREY PHOTOS COURTESY ZANE GREY’S WEST SOCIETY, THE HAROLD B. LEE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY AT BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY AND ZANE GREY INC.; ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY ED MELL –

Thank the Grand Canyon.

Long before it was a national park— before it was even a game preserve, thanks to President Teddy Roosevelt—this steep-sided canyon of grandeur inspired one of the greatest storytellers of the American West.

He was a writer who touched hundreds of millions in 20 languages, telling stories of Old West ethics and codes— in glory and shame— while painting verbal scenes so vivid, the landscape became a living character.

Yes, Arizona’s Grand Canyon deserves credit because the nearly 34-year-old Zane Grey was smitten to his soul after experiencing the canyon on his honeymoon in 1906—on his wife’s dime—and on a hunting expedition in 1907. Until then, he’d been an Ohio boy, then a Pennsylvania boy, then a New York dentist with a hankering to write, but a drawer full of rejections—his first self-published books were about his historic family from days when Ohio was as far west as anyone went.

Once he experienced the spellbinding Grand Canyon—named a national park 13 years after he first saw it—he found the land and people he would bring alive in some nine million words in 58 Westerns that became 113 movies and a TV series to a worldwide audience of 250 million.