He is known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontier.

Muddy Miser was an old man who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing, and who talked about the advantages of an unconventional life.

Despite warnings by Grey's father to steer clear of Miser, the boy spent much time during five formative years in the company of the old man.

[7] Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe and the Leatherstocking Tales, as well as dime novels featuring Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick.

[10] Because of the shame he felt as the result of a severe financial setback in 1889 due to a poor investment, Lewis Grey moved his family from Zanesville and started again in Columbus, Ohio.

[12] Grey also worked as a part-time usher in a theater and played summer baseball for the Columbus Capitols, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer.

[12] Grey chose the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship; he studied dentistry, joined Sigma Nu fraternity, and graduated in 1896.

Grey struggled with the idea of becoming a writer or baseball player for his career, but unhappily concluded that dentistry was the practical choice.

In addition to her considerable editorial skills, she had good business sense and handled all his contract negotiations with publishers, agents, and movie studios.

[40] After attending a lecture in New York in 1907 at the Camp-Fire Club by Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, western hunter and guide who had co-founded Garden City, Kansas, Grey arranged for a mountain lion-hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him.

He wrote, "Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work.

[43] Grey continued to write popular novels about Manifest Destiny, the conquest of the Old West, and the behavior of men in elemental conditions.

[citation needed] Two years later Grey produced his best-known book, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), his all-time best-seller, and one of the most successful Western novels in history.

[48] Grey's publishers paired his novels with some of the best illustrators of the time, including N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Douglas Duer, W. Herbert Dunton, W. H. D. Koerner, and Charles Russell.

He had avoided making investments that would have been affected by the stock market crash of 1929, and continued to earn royalty income, so he did better than many financially.

[57] Near the end of his life, Grey looked into the future and wrote: The so-called civilization of man and his works shall perish from the earth, while the shifting sands, the red looming walls, the purple sage, and the towering monuments, the vast brooding range show no perceptible change.

"[59] T. K. Whipple praised a typical Grey novel as a modern version of the ancient Beowulf saga, "a battle of passions with one another and with the will, a struggle of love and hate, or remorse and revenge, of blood, lust, honor, friendship, anger, grief—all of a grand scale and all incalculable and mysterious."

[citation needed] His novel The Vanishing American (1925), first serialized in The Ladies' Home Journal in 1922, prompted a heated debate.

With this book, Grey completed the most productive period of his writing career, having laid out most major themes, character types, and settings.

He first visited New Zealand in 1926 and caught several large fish of great variety, including a mako shark, a ferocious fighter that presented a new challenge.

He held numerous world records during this time[70] and invented the teaser, a hookless bait that is still used today to attract fish.

Patron of the Bermagui Sport Fishing Association for 1936 and 1937, Grey set a number of world records,[71][72][73] and wrote of his experiences in his book An American Angler in Australia.

Zane Grey was a major force in shaping the myths of the Old West; his books and stories were adapted into other media, such as film and TV productions.

[86] In 1953 columnist Hedda Hopper reported that a proposed film project, Thirty Thousand on the Hoof, was based on one of the six unfinished Grey novels that had been completed by his wife.

[89] Legendary director John Ford was then a young stage hand and Tom Mix, who had been a real cowhand, was defining the persona of the film cowboy.

The period of the 1940s and 1950s included the great works of John Ford, who successfully used the settings of Grey's novels in Arizona and Utah.

[94] The success of Grey's The Lone Star Ranger (the novel was adapted into four movies: 1914, 1919, 1930 and 1942, and a comic book in 1949) and King of the Royal Mounted (popular as a series of Big Little Books and comics, later turned into a 1936 film and three film serials) inspired two radio series by George Trendle (WXYZ, Detroit).

They included Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Richard Arlen, Buster Crabbe, Shirley Temple, and Fay Wray.

Victor Fleming, later director of Gone with the Wind, and Henry Hathaway, who later directed True Grit, both learned their craft on Grey films.