Riders of the Purple Sage

Zane Grey did not invent the western but he made it a bestselling novel form, and Riders of the Purple Sage is the book that did it: it stayed in print continuously and outsold almost everything else of its decade. What it fixed for the form was the furniture rather than the plot. The lone rider with a past who arrives to protect somebody who cannot protect themselves, the landscape described at length and treated as a moral force, the valley that can be sealed off, and the violence deferred as long as possible and then decisive. Louis L'Amour worked inside that shape for a hundred books, and Hondo is the purest instance: a man, a dog, a woman alone on a homestead and a landscape that is the real antagonist. The connection is a genre debt with a named founder rather than a borrowing of anything specific, which is what a MEDIUM weight is for.

Cooper's Leatherstocking novels are the origin of the American frontier romance and of the figure every later western is built on: the white man raised at the edge of two cultures, more at home in the wilderness than in the settlement, who makes the settlement possible and has no place in it once it exists. Natty Bumppo goes by five names across five books and is skilled, solitary, morally certain and doomed to be displaced by what he protects. That is Shane, that is Hondo, and in Grey it is Lassiter. The other inheritance is the landscape. Cooper's forests are described at a length that has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with asserting that the continent is a subject; Grey does the same thing with the Utah canyon country, which is the part of Riders of the Purple Sage that readers remember.