Zane Grey wrote the historical novel The Spirit of the Border, which was first released in 1906. The events depicted in the book are those that took place in the Ohio River Valley in the late eighteenth century. It tells the story of Lewis Wetzel, a historical figure who devoted his life to eliminating Native Americans and defending emerging European settlements in that area. The plot centers on the attempt by Moravian Church missionaries to convert Indians to Christianity and the divergent routes that the lives of the two brothers take when they cross the border.However, when the Village of Peace, a Christian utopian settlement, is destroyed, the settlers know they will have to hunt him down. The evil Girty brothers urge Indians to commit a succession of killings.The author doesn't mean to defend the story's "brutality," as some readers may see it, but rather to emphasize that the story's wild spirit is genuine to the life of the Western frontier as it was known just a little more than a century ago.
Zane Grey was born on January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. He was a dentist and a writer, and he was famous for his western adventure novels and stories. As he was trained as a dentist, he practised in New York City from 1898 to 1904, while he published confidentially a novel of pioneer life, Betty Zane. Choosing to leave dentistry for full-time writing, he published 1905's The Spirit of the Border, which was based on Zane's notes and unexpectedly turned into a best seller. The author also wrote more than 80 books. Various books were published after his death, and more than 50 were printed in the last quarter of the 20th century. The most famous novel was Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), followed by The Lone Star Ranger (1915), The U.P. Trail in 1918, Call of the Canyon in 1924, and Code of the West in 1934.His remarkable non-fiction novel was Tales of Fishing (1925).
