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10 unusual facts about Zane Grey


1926 in New Zealand

Writer and adventurer Zane Grey first visited New Zealand, helping to popularise big-game fishing

Audrey Chapman

She was among the cast of Wildfire (1921), based on a Zane Grey novel.

Bermagui, New South Wales

Zane Grey, the well-known big-game fisherman of the 1930s and author of Westerns, wrote of his experiences there.

Fred Kohler

With the advent of the talkies, Kohler reprised many of his silent roles in remakes with sound, particularly in Westerns based on novels by Zane Grey.

Industrial Workers of the World philosophy and tactics

Historically the IWW was accused of outright damage to property — for example, getting the blame for causing wheat field fires in a book of fiction by Zane Grey, published in 1919 at the height of the red scare.

John Heyer

In these early years he worked on such feature films as Heritage, Thoroughbred, White Death in which Zane Grey appeared, and Forty Thousand Horsemen.

Lew Murphy

While in college he met Carol Carney, granddaughter of Zane Grey.

Marshall University

The name Thundering Herd came from a Zane Grey novel released in 1925, and a silent movie of the same two years later.

Picacho, California

Picacho was the setting of Zane Grey’s 1923 novel Wanderer of the Wasteland, later made into a silent film.

Zane Grey Highline Trail 50 Mile Run

The following year, the course was rerouted because of the Dude Fire which burned down Zane Grey’s cabin, located just off the Highline Trail.


Alcatraz Library

Other authors include Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Washington Irving, Zane Grey, Hamilton Garland, Alexandre Dumas, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Cervantes and magazines such as Adventure to Time, Better Homes and Gardens and Library Digest.

Allan Lane

The first was King of the Royal Mounted, a 1940 serial adaptation of Zane Grey's King of the Royal Mounted, with Lane playing the lead role.

Jerry McDaniel

In the late 1960s, McDaniel designed and illustrated the complete Zane Grey Western Series for Simon & Schuster, and also created book covers for the S. S. Van Dine "Murder Mystery" series for three different publishers, including Charles Scribner's Sons’s over a ten-year period.

Leif Erickson

Erickson made his film debut in two 1933 band films with Betty Grable before starting a string of Buster Crabbe western films based on Zane Grey novels.

Marco the Buffalo

Duke Ridgley was a fan of Zane Grey's novel, "The Thundering Herd," and the silent movie that came out not long after the book was released in 1925.

Rangle River

The original story was written by Zane Grey while at Bermagui during his 1935 fishing tour of Australia, a period which also produced the film White Death (1936).