Life, love and literature

My parents grew up during The Great Depression in our country. Neither of them attended any level of education after the 8th grade! They had to work to help the families survive. They had a good collection of novels by Zane Grey when I was young! You could say that his novels introduced me to the western long before I had read THE VIRGINIAN! They were absolutely fascinating- the romance, the descriptions of the beautiful western landscapes – the larger than life characters who roamed the pages and came to life to entertain and thrill me. Of course, I spent many Saturday afternoons at our Aztec theater in my small Texas hometown of Albany. I thought Roy Rogers was more handsome than Gene Autry, but liked Gene’s singing better . Even better than watching the Saturday matinees was reading the Zane Grey novels. My favorite was a novel called THE RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE! I probably read it 10 times over the years from the time I first discovered it until I went to college, got my BA degree in English and started concentrating on the classics! I put aside Zane Grey for many years. A fellow teacher and I started talking about some of our early reading influences. He loved Zane Grey as much or more than I did. By the time I retired after 38 years of teaching English, I started seeing Zane Grey books in paperback at Walmart and at Hastings! I told my friend that I thought I would read a Zane Grey novel to see if it still appealed to my sensibilities! I was not disappointed! I started my own collection of paperback novels!! One thing the people who were marketing the novels did that irritated me was changing the original title to something different just to sell more copies!! When I discovered that that’s what was happening, I returned the 2 or 3 I had found and told the distributor! I challenge any reader to get a copy of any of his novels ( but preferably RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE) When the hero and heroine are riding for their very lives, and climb the mountain to escape, my heart still races when they roll the huge boulder down that will lock them forever in a safe, beautiful valley. It is so satisfying, but to this day I want the rest of their story. I want to know if they have a family, how they survive the winters, what they eat and how their lives end. One thing seems certain; this author didn’t do sequels, so one is free to imagine the rest of their lives!