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Authors

PEARL Zane Grey (1872 - 1939) was an American author and dentist best known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage was his best-selling book. In addition to the commercial success of his printed works, his books have had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and television productions. His novels and short stories have been adapted into 112 films, two television episodes, and a television series, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater.

Andy Adams (1859–1935), author, was born in Whitley County, Indiana, to Andrew and Elizabeth Adams, who belonged to a cultured pioneer Scots-Irish family. He became one of the few writers of the West who had a knowledge based on experience that enabled him to record cowboy life authentically. Because he knew the real West, he was able to write with a remarkable verisimilitude-a quality he maintained without compromise. The Log of a Cowboy, Adams's best work, was published in 1903. It tells of a five-month drive of over 3,000 cattle from Brownsville to Montana in 1882 and has been called the best chronicle written of the great days in the cattle country.

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OWEN WISTER (1860 – 1938), the writer credited with creating the classic Western hero and the popular western novel, was born in Philadelphia. When he started writing, Wister naturally inclined towards fiction set on the western frontier. His most famous work remains the 1902 novel The Virginian, a complex mixture of persons, places and events dramatized from experience, word of mouth, and his own imagination – ultimately creating the archetypal cowboy, who is a natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War, and taking the side of the large landowners. This is widely regarded as being the first cowboy novel and was reprinted fourteen times in eight months. It stands as one of the top 50 best-selling works of fiction and is considered by Hollywood experts to be the basis for the modern fictional cowboy portrayed in literature, film and television.