Audiobook · read by volunteers
Riders of the Purple Sage
Zane Grey (1872–1939)
Read by Laurie Anne Walden · 23 chapters · 10 h 45
About the book
Utah, 1871. Jane Withersteen owns a great ranch and is respected throughout her community, but she has angered the leaders of her church by refusing to marry an elder and by treating non-Mormons kindly. Her cattle disappear, her riders are driven off, and her friends are frightened. Then a lone rider named Lassiter arrives, a mysterious gunman with a hard reputation and a quiet courtesy. He has come to the region for reasons of his own, and he is not a man to turn away from a fight. Meanwhile her loyal rider Bern Venters has an adventure of his own in the wild canyon country. Zane Grey fills the story with sweeping desert landscapes, tense confrontations and the glow of the setting sun on red rock. It is one of the great classics of the western, a tale of courage, faith and the cost of freedom.
Introduction
Zane Grey, born in Ohio in 1872 and died in 1939, was trained as a dentist before he became one of the best-selling authors in America. His books about the frontier and the desert Southwest defined the western in the early twentieth century, and many were made into films. He travelled in the places he wrote about, and his love of wild scenery shines through his descriptions.
Riders of the Purple Sage appeared in 1912 and is often considered his masterpiece. It established many of the conventions of the genre: the lone gunman with a past, the beautiful landscape and the struggle between a threatened woman and the powerful men who surround her. At the same time, the novel is unusual in the way it examines the power of a religious community and the tensions between loyalty to one’s faith and one’s own conscience. Its portrait of the desert has a great deal of poetry.
This recording has twenty-three sections and runs for nearly eleven hours, and it is read by a single LibriVox volunteer. It is a good choice for lovers of adventure and of the American West, as well as for those who want to see how the western took shape. The pace is steady, the characters are strong and the scenery is unforgettable.
Grey’s prose is sometimes overheated, yet it has a power that is difficult to resist. The sage and the canyon walls, the sound of hoofbeats and the long silences before a duel are all given their due. The result is a story that has been imitated many times and has seldom been matched.
Public domain
Zane Grey died in 1939: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text