The bishop of the nearby town wants to force her into polygamous marriage, but she is holding him at bay. This, of course, gives her a measure of autonomy that offends the Mormon elders. She is unusual in that she’s a single woman who has inherited and operates a large cattle ranch. Of the four main characters, only one, Jane Withersteen, is a Mormon. I was living in an evangelical household against which I was already in rebellion, and the theme of defying religious conformity should have made a larger impression on me. I don’t know how that part slipped my mind. It is set in southern Utah where “gentiles,” or non-Mormons, are threatened, harassed, and impoverished by the Mormon townsfolk. What I didn’t recall, what appears to have made no impression upon me at the time, is that the book is an anti-Mormon tract. The plot centers on two couples who clearly want to have sex but never do. (I counted six uses of the word purple in the first page and a quarter.) I began to wonder if this book was the origin of the phrase “purple prose.” This ambient sexual tension is all I remembered about the book from my first pubescent encounter with it. Perhaps this is why the sage is so continuously purple. To me it seems more like a romance novel set in the West. Wikipedia says that this is the book on which the Western genre was founded. Because I hadn’t read it since I was around twelve, I remembered very little. The Paris Review asked if I would write something about Riders. Presumably these were considered wholesome. Some, like The Grapes of Wrath, were forbidden-but I was allowed to read Gone with the Wind and Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Only a few books were available in my household, and I read whatever I could get my hands on. Here, Rae Armantrout revisits Zane Grey’s novel Riders of the Purple Sage.Īs I mentioned in my Art of Poetry interview in The Paris Review’s Winter issue, my mother loved Westerns, especially Zane Grey.

A second plot involves a innocent girl Bern Venters accidentally shot…or is she innocent?! The lives of all these people intertwine ….Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago.

The plot deepens and it involves a horse race and a decision to whether to roll a large stone that forever closes off the only way in or out of her hiding place. she abandons her beliefs and discovers her true love. She is blinded by her faith to see that her church men are the ones harming her. Things get complicated when Bern Venters and Lassiter, a famous gunman and killer of Mormons help her look after her cattle and horses. A leader of the church, Elder Tull, wants to marry her, but she has evaded him for years. Riders of the Purple Sage is a novel that tells the story of a woman by the name of Jane Withersteen and her battle to overcome persecution by members of her polygamous Mormon fundamentalist church.

Zane gray riders of the purple sage