Growing up, I can remember my father always reading paperback westerns by Louis L'amour and Zane Grey. And although I read a fair amount of L'amour books as a kid, for some reason I never read any of Grey's novels. Riders of the Purple Sage sat on my "to be read" list for a long time, and now that I'm finished with the book, I'm glad I finally took the plunge.
Published in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage is the novel that essentially defined the Western genre. The book was a huge success for Grey, selling over a million copies upon publication.
The book is set in southern Utah, in the town of Cottonwoods, and tells the story of three central characters. Lassiter, a gunman in black leather who spends his life searching for a woman abducted long ago. Jane Withersteen, a Mormon cattle rancher, pressured into marrying against her will. And Venters, a Gentile who has been outcasted by the town's church elder for his friendship with Jane.
Although I began the book with a stereotype in mind, expecting a fast-paced, shoot em' up western, I have to admit that Riders of the Purple Sage took a while to get used to. There isn't nearly as much action (gunfighting...etc.) as I would have expected, and the book turned out really to be a love story with an underlying tension of varying religious beliefs. I was also suprised to find it filled with passage after passage of amazing nature writing. In my opinion, the descriptions of the landscape and weather that make up that part of the country, were just as good as anything I've read in Wallace Stegner's classic portrayals of the west.
"... but these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight, and Venters felt a strange sympathy for them. This country was hard on trees --- and men."
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