Literary Birthday – 31 January – Zane Grey

Zane Grey was born 31 January 1872 and died 23 October 1939.

Zane Grey Quotes

1. I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.
2. I love my work but do not know how I write it.
3. These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.
4. There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.
5. Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
6. The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.
7. I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.

Zane Grey was an American author who idealised the American frontier. His romantic novels of the American West largely created the new literary genre, the Western. He wrote more than 80 novels and Riders of the Purple Sage was his bestselling book. He suffered from writer’s block and then had bursts of energy where he wrote as many as 100,000 words in a month. He wrote in pencil with little or no punctuation and his first draft was the final one. His novels and short stories were adapted into 112 films, two television episodes, and a television series.

Source for image: University of Washington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zane_Grey,_a_silent_film_actor_and_author_of_westerns_(SAYRE_3131).jpg
Source for quotes

by Amanda Patterson

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