num_pages: 304
description: A master of narrative momentum and suspense, Zane Grey sweeps readers into his stories and makes them feel that things are out of control, that boundaries are being burst. In  Riders of the Purple Sage , the most famous novel of the American West, Grey creates a hero of epic proportions, a villain of legendary evil and a world in which the landscape is rendered with such force that it seems to express thoughts and feelings, to become a character in its own right. Indeed,  Riders of the Purple Sage  derives much of its depth and power from passions whose forbidden and overwhelming nature cannot be expressed by human beings and are therefore embodied in the natural world. In his depiction of the relationship between Lassiter, the hero, and Jane Withersteen, Grey breaks other literary Jane, modelled on the heroines of the nineteenth-century novel, must come to terms with the values expressed by Lassiter - the harsh, "masculine" values of the twentieth century. Their struggles together represent the tumultuous changes society itself was confronting.
language: English
title: Riders of the Purple Sage
titlecomplete: Riders of the Purple Sage (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
characters: Jane Withersteen, Jim Lassiter
genres: Fiction, Classics, Audiobook, Historical, Westerns, Historical Fiction, Romance, Literature, Adventure, Novels
ratings_count: 12745
places: Utah
series: Riders of the Purple Sage
publisher: Penguin Classics