Sydney Shores (September 4, 1913^[1] – June 3, 1973)^[2] was an American comic book artist known for his work on Captain America both during the 1940s, in what fans and historians call the Golden Age of comic books, and during the 1960s Silver Age of comic books.

Biography[link]

Early life and career[link]

Syd Shores was educated at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where he met his wife-to-be, Selma.^[3] After working seven years at his uncle's whiskey bottling plant until it closed down in 1940, he became an assistant at the quirkily named Harry "A" Chesler's studio, under comics artists Mac Raboy and Phil Sturm. "For months I was just a joe-boy, watching and learning and helping wherever I could. I studied Mac Raboy for hours on end — he was slow and meticulous about everything, doing maybe only a single panel of artwork a day, but it was truly beautiful work. After four months I tried my own hand at work, doing a seven-page piece called 'The Terror'. I was proud of it then, of course, but in looking back it really was a terror!"^[3]

"The Terror" still held enough promise that it saw print in Mystic Comics #5 (March 1941) from Timely Comics, the 1940s precursor of Marvel Comics, and went on to make other appearances.^[4] Timely editor Joe Simon hired Shores as the fledgling company's third employee.^[3]

Golden Age of comics[link]

Shores initially worked as an inker, embellishing some of the earliest pencil work of industry legend Jack Kirby, including the covers of the Simon & Kirby-created Captain America Comics #5, 7 and 9 in 1941.^[4][5] After the Simon & Kirby team moved on following Captain America Comics #10 (Jan. 1942), Shores and Al Avison became regular pencilers of the hit title, with one generally inking over the other, both working with writer Stan Lee.^[6] At that point, Shores received a promotion, he recalled in 1973, "When Simon and Kirby left in 1942 Stan did all the writing and was given the position of editorial director, while I was the art director, although I got called 'associate editor' in the books that were put out around then."^[3] Shores took over as regular penciller on Captain America Comics, inked by Vince Alascia, while Avison did his World War II military service.^[3] Decades later, Shores would return to ink Kirby's Captain America during the 1960s Silver Age of Comic Books.

Shores also inked two of Kirby's Golden Age Vision stories, in Marvel Mystery Comics #21-22 (July-Aug. 1941); and the cover and splash page of Young Allies #1 (July 1941). Shores said, "Jack Kirby influenced my sense of dramatics. Jack Kirby influences everybody in comics, though: Before I got really started in the field it was Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, they were my gods back then, but Kirby was the most immediate influence."^[3] Shores penciled stories of the Vision and the Patriot in Marvel Mystery Comics, Major Liberty in USA Comics, and the Captain America portions of the All-Winners Squad stories in the (unhyphenated) All Winners Comics #19 and 21 (Fall and Winter 1946; there was no issue #20).^{[citation needed]}

Shores was inducted into the U.S. Army in early 1944, seeing action as part of General Patton's Third Army in France and Germany, and receiving a Purple Heart for being wounded in France on 16 December 1944. After four months at a convalescent hospital in Warwick, England, he was reassigned to an engineering outfit and became part of the occupation forces in Germany.^{[citation needed]}

Comic-book artist Gene Colan recalled in 1999,

My first real professional start in the comic-book business began in the summer of 1946, and that is when I met Syd Shores. He was the head man in the Art Department of Marvel Comics. ... I was flying by the seat of my pants ... hoping that everything would turn out. I didn't want the seams to show but that was all part of the learning process and Syd helped me wade through. ... His realistic style, for some time, became an obsession with me. His characters looked like the real thing. Whatever he had them doing was as real to life as you could get.^[7]

Post-war career[link]

After his military discharge in January 1946, Shores returned to Timely as art director. Future Comic Book Hall of Famer Gene Colan, a Marvel mainstay from 1946 on, described Shores during this time as "a very quiet man. He would come in with a kind of very slow walk, with a cup of morning coffee in one of these spiral cups and a cigarette in the other. Big smoker. He would say hello to everybody very quietly, and sit down. He'd been in the war in Germany, and sometimes I'd try to feel him out about it. He never wanted to talk about it. Very quiet fellow, but a sweet, sweet guy, and very helpful; very unassuming".^[8]

At postwar Timely and at the company's 1950s successor, Atlas Comics, Shores was among the artists on the company's superhero stars the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, the Western titles The Black Rider and Kid Colt, Outlaw, the jungle series Jann of the Jungle and Jungle Action, the war comics Battle Action and Battle Brady, and many others including Blonde Phantom.^[4]

Going freelance in 1948, when virtually all of Timely's staff positions were eliminated, Shores drew for Atlas, Avon, and Orbit Publications.^[4] With Mort Lawrence, who succeeded Bill Everett on The Sub-Mariner, and Norman Steinberg, another Atlas artist, Shores co-founded a comic-art studio^[2] in 1952, first in Hempstead, Long Island, and later in nearby Freeport.^{[citation needed]} But with Steinberg's death in the mid-1950s and Lawrence's decision to leave the field, Shores returned to individual freelancing, adding magazine illustration to his repertoire. He said in a 1970 interview that, "In 1957, there was a recession in the comic book industry and I was forced to look elsewhere for work. I entered the magazine illustration field. I did illustrations for the men's adventure-type magazines until 1967. After things picked up again in the comic field I hastened back again to my first love, comics!"^[9]

Silver Age of Comics[link]

In the 1960s, Shores found a new audience at Marvel Comics, where he once again Jack Kirby on Captain America when the character once more received a full-length title, Captain America. Shores inked the premiere issue (#100, April 1968, continuing the numbering from Tales of Suspense, a split book shared with Iron Man) and continued through seven of the first 10. He also inked a run of Gene Colan's Daredevil, as well Colan's backup feature "The Watcher" in Silver Surfer #1 & #6 (Aug. 1968 & June 1969); Dick Ayers' and Don Heck's Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders / Capt. Savage and His Battlefield Raiders, and a variety of other titles.^[4]

In a rare return to penciling at Marvel, Shores drew and self-inked the anthological horror stories "The Face of Fear" in Chamber of Darkness #2 (Dec. 1969), "Time Out" in Tower of Shadows #5 (May 1970), "Master and Slave" in Creatures on the Loose #12 (July 1971), "In the Shadow of Tragg — He Who Walks Beneath the Earth" in Monsters on the Prowl #13 (Oct. 1971), and "Terror of the Pterodactyl" in #15 (February 1972), as well as Gerry Conway's adaptation of Harlan Ellison's "Delusions for a Dragon Slayer" in Chamber of Chills #1 (Nov. 1972). Additionally, Shores penciled and occasionally self-inked several Western stories, including the premiere of the feature "Tales of Fort Rango" in Western Gunfighters #1 (August 1970); The Gunhawks #1-2 & 4-5 (Oct.-Dec.1972, April–June 1973); and the Native American hero Red Wolf in Marvel Spotlight #1 (Nov.1971) and Red Wolf #1-8 (May 1972 - July 1973). Shores also penciled the Skywald Publications Western The Bravados #1 (Aug. 1971).^[4]

He likewise penciled a handful of black-and-white horror-comics magazine stories, such as "Blood Thirst!" in Major Publications' Web Of Horror #1 (Dec. 1969) and "Strangers!" in #3 (April 1970); and for Warren Publishing, "Army of the Walking Dead" in Creepy #35 (Sept. 1970) and "King Keller" in #37 (Jan. 1971).^[4]

Despite this seeming steady stream of work, fellow Golden Age and Silver Age artist Joe Giella recalled that, "Syd later became a taxi cab driver; that was so sad. I happened to see him while I was on jury duty back in the early ' 70s, and he told me he was driving a cab because he couldn't find work".^[10]

Some of Shores' last comics work was inking Tom Sutton and Jim Mooney on, respectively Marvel's Ghost Rider #1-2 (Sept.-Oct. 1973). A trouper to the end, he finished penciling two-thirds of the eight-page story "Voodoo War" for Marvel's black-and-white horror-comics magazine Tales of the Zombie #5 (May 1974) before dying of a heart seizure^[2] at age 59. Dick Ayers penciled the remainder of writer Tony Isabella's anthological horror tale.

Legacy[link]

The survey "The 20 Greatest Inkers of American Comic Books" placed Shores at #11, saying he ""evidenced a unique and singular inking style, one perhaps only vaguely approximated by the great Bill Everett. Both had bold but rough-hewn lines and illustrative, photorealistic brushwork which gave the pages a beautiful, organic look. . . ."^[11]

Shores Golden Age reprints[link]

Marvel Comics reprints of 1940s Timely Comics stories, listed chronologically from date of earliest original publication:

• Captain America: The Classic Years (1998) ISBN 0-7851-0660-X

Covers, Captain America Comics #2, 5-7 (April, August–October 1941)

• Captain America: The Classic Years, Vol. 2 (2000) ISBN 0-7851-0743-6

Captain America Comics #7 (Oct. 1941)

"Captain America and the Red Skull"

"Death Loads the Bases"

"Horror Plays the Scales"

• The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997) ISBN 0-7851-0564-6

Captain America Comics #22 (Jan. 1943): "The Cobra Ring of Death"

• Fantasy Masterpieces #10 (Aug. 1967) and Timely Presents: All-Winners (hyphen sic) #1 (Dec. 1999)

All Winners Comics #19 (Fall 1946)

• Marvel Super-Heroes #17-18 (Nov. 1968 - January 1969)

All Winners Comics #21 (Winter 1946)

References[link]

United States Army portal

External links[link]

• The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators
• "The Syd Shores Checklist". Archived from the original on March 11, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050311032904/http://www.ess.comics.org/ess/shores/shcheckl.html. 
• Nevins, Jess. "The Timely Comics Story". WebCitation archive.
• Stiles, Steve. "The Star-Spangled Avenger: Timely Declares War Against The Axis", SteveStiles.com, n.d. WebCitation archive.
• Vassallo, Michael J. "A Timely Talk with Allen Bellman", Comicartville.com, 2005. WebCitation archive.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Born	Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson 13 November 1850 Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	3 December 1894 (aged 44) Vailima, Samoa
Occupation	Novelist, poet, travel writer
Nationality	Scottish
Period	Victorian era
Notable work(s)	Treasure Island A Child's Garden of Verses Kidnapped Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Spouse(s)	Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne
Children	Isobel Osbourne Strong (stepdaughter) Lloyd Osbourne (stepson)
Relative(s)	father: Thomas Stevenson mother: Margaret Isabella Balfour
Influences Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant,[1] Nathaniel Hawthorne[2]
Influenced H. Rider Haggard, Jorge Luis Borges, Javier Marías, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, Michael de Larrabeiti, Arthur Conan Doyle, Diana Gabaldon

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world.^[3] He has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov,^[4] J. M. Barrie,^[5] and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."^[6]

Life[link]

Childhood[link]

Daguerreotype portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson as a young child

Stevenson's childhood home in Heriot Row

Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson^[7] at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850, to the former Margaret Isabella Balfour (1829–1897) and Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), a leading lighthouse engineer.^[8] Lighthouse design was the family profession: Thomas's own father (Robert's grandfather) was the famous Robert Stevenson, and Thomas's maternal grandfather, Thomas Smith, and brothers Alan and David were also among those in the business.^[9] On Margaret's side, the family were gentry, tracing their name back to an Alexander Balfour, who held the lands of Inchrye in Fife in the fifteenth century. Her father, Lewis Balfour (1777–1860), was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton,^[10] and Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his house. "Now I often wonder", wrote Stevenson, "what I inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them."^[11]

Lewis Balfour and his daughter both had weak chests, and often needed to stay in warmer climates for their health. Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers, exacerbated when the family moved to a damp and chilly house at 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1851.^[12] The family moved again to the sunnier 17 Heriot Row when Stevenson was six, but the tendency to extreme sickness in winter remained with him until he was eleven. Illness would be a recurrent feature of his adult life and left him extraordinarily thin.^[13] Contemporary views were that he had tuberculosis, but more recent views are that it was bronchiectasis^[14] or even sarcoidosis.^[15]

Stevenson's parents were both devout and serious Presbyterians, but the household was not strict in its adherence to Calvinist principles. His nurse, Alison Cunningham (known as Cummy),^[16] was more fervently religious. Her Calvinism and folk beliefs were an early source of nightmares for the child, and he showed a precocious concern for religion.^[17] But she also cared for him tenderly in illness, reading to him from Bunyan and the Bible as he lay sick in bed and telling tales of the Covenanters. Stevenson recalled this time of sickness in "The Land of Counterpane" in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885),^[18] and dedicated the book to his nurse.^[19]

Robert Louis Stevenson at the age of seven

An only child, strange-looking and eccentric, Stevenson found it hard to fit in when he was sent to a nearby school at age six, a problem repeated at age eleven when he went on to the Edinburgh Academy; but he mixed well in lively games with his cousins in summer holidays at Colinton.^[20] In any case, his frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school, and he was taught for long stretches by private tutors. He was a late reader, first learning at age seven or eight, but even before this he dictated stories to his mother and nurse.^[21] He compulsively wrote stories throughout his childhood. His father was proud of this interest; he had also written stories in his spare time until his own father found them and told him to "give up such nonsense and mind your business."^[9] He paid for the printing of Robert's first publication at sixteen, an account of the covenanters' rebellion which was published on its two hundredth anniversary, The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666 (1866).^[22]

In November 1867 Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. He showed from the start no enthusiasm for his studies and devoted much energy to avoiding lectures. This time was more important for the friendships he made with other students in the Speculative Society (an exclusive debating club), particularly with Charles Baxter, who would become Stevenson's financial agent, and with a professor, Fleeming Jenkin, whose house staged amateur drama in which Stevenson took part, and whose biography he would later write.^[23] Perhaps most important at this point in his life was a cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as "Bob"), a lively and light-hearted young man who instead of the family profession had chosen to study art.^[24] Each year during vacations, Stevenson travelled to inspect the family's engineering works—to Anstruther and Wick in 1868, with his father on his official tour of Orkney and Shetland islands lighthouses in 1869, and for three weeks to the island of Erraid in 1870. He enjoyed the travels more for the material they gave for his writing than for any engineering interest. The voyage with his father pleased him because a similar journey of Walter Scott with Robert Stevenson had provided the inspiration for Scott's 1821 novel The Pirate.^[25] In April 1871 Stevenson notified his father of his decision to pursue a life of letters. Though the elder Stevenson was naturally disappointed, the surprise cannot have been great, and Stevenson's mother reported that he was "wonderfully resigned" to his son's choice. To provide some security, it was agreed that Stevenson should read Law (again at Edinburgh University) and be called to the Scottish bar.^[26] In his 1887 poetry collection Underwoods, Stevenson muses his turning from the family profession:^[27]

Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.

In other respects too, Stevenson was moving away from his upbringing. His dress became more Bohemian; he already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket and rarely attended parties in conventional evening dress.^[28] Within the limits of a strict allowance, he visited cheap pubs and brothels.^[29] More importantly, he had come to reject Christianity. In January 1873 his father came across the constitution of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club, of which Stevenson and his cousin Bob were members, which began: "Disregard everything our parents have taught us." Questioning his son about his beliefs, he discovered the truth, leading to a long period of dissension with both parents:^[30]

What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said "You have rendered my whole life a failure". As my mother said "This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me". O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.

Early writing and travels[link]

The author, c. 1877

In late 1873, on a visit to a cousin in England, Stevenson met two people who were to be of great importance to him, Sidney Colvin and Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell. Sitwell was a 34-year-old woman with a son, separated from her husband. She attracted the devotion of many who met her, including Colvin, who eventually married her in 1901. Stevenson was also drawn to her, and over several years they kept up a heated correspondence in which Stevenson wavered between the role of a suitor and a son (he came to address her as "Madonna").^[31] Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser and after his death was the first editor of Stevenson's letters. Soon after their first meeting, he had placed Stevenson's first paid contribution, an essay entitled "Roads," in The Portfolio.^[32] Stevenson was soon active in London literary life, becoming acquainted with many of the writers of the time, including Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse,^[33] and Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, who took an interest in Stevenson's work. Stephen in turn would introduce him to a more important friend. Visiting Edinburgh in 1875, he took Stevenson with him to visit a patient at the Edinburgh Infirmary, William Ernest Henley. Henley, an energetic and talkative man with a wooden leg, became a close friend and occasional literary collaborator, until a quarrel broke up the friendship in 1888. Henley is often seen as the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island.^[34]

In November 1873 Stevenson's health failed, and he was sent to Menton on the French Riviera to recuperate. He returned in better health in April 1874 and settled down to his studies, but he returned to France several times after that.^[35] He made long and frequent trips to the neighbourhood of the Forest of Fontainebleau, staying at Barbizon, Grez-sur-Loing, and Nemours and becoming a member of the artists' colonies there, as well as to Paris to visit galleries and the theatres.^[36] He did qualify for the Scottish bar in July 1875, and his father added a brass plate with "R.L. Stevenson, Advocate" to the Heriot Row house. But although his law studies would influence his books, he never practised law.^[37] All his energies were now spent in travel and writing. One of his journeys, a canoe voyage in Belgium and France with Sir Walter Simpson,^[38] a friend from the Speculative Society and frequent travel companion, was the basis of his first real book, An Inland Voyage (1878).^[39]

Marriage[link]

Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, c. 1876

The canoe voyage with Simpson brought Stevenson to Grez in September 1876, and here he first met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840–1914). Born in Indianapolis, she had married at age seventeen and moved to Nevada to rejoin husband Samuel after his participation in the American Civil War. That marriage produced three children: Isobel (or "Belle"); Lloyd; and Hervey (who died in 1875). But anger over her husband's infidelities led to a number of separations and in 1875 she had taken her children to France, where she and Isobel studied art.^[40] Although Stevenson returned to Britain shortly after this first meeting, Fanny apparently remained in his thoughts, and he wrote an essay, "On falling in love," for the Cornhill Magazine.^[41] They met again early in 1877 and became lovers. Stevenson spent much of the following year with her and her children in France.^[42] In August 1878 Fanny returned to San Francisco, California. Stevenson at first remained in Europe, making the walking trip that would form the basis for Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). But in August 1879 he set off to join her, against the advice of his friends and without notifying his parents. He took second-class passage on the steamship Devonia, in part to save money but also to learn how others travelled and to increase the adventure of the journey.^[43] From New York City he travelled overland by train to California. He later wrote about the experience in The Amateur Emigrant. Although it was good experience for his literature, it broke his health, and he was near death when he arrived in Monterey, California, where some local ranchers nursed him back to health.

By December 1879 Stevenson had recovered his health enough to continue to San Francisco, where for several months he struggled "all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts,"^[44] in an effort to support himself through his writing, but by the end of the winter his health was broken again and he found himself at death's door. Fanny, now divorced and recovered from her own illness, came to Stevenson's bedside and nursed him to recovery. "After a while," he wrote, "my spirit got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis and success."^[45] When his father heard of his condition, he cabled him money to help him through this period.

Fanny and Robert were married in May 1880, although, as he said, he was "a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom."^[46] With his new wife and her son, Lloyd,^[47] he travelled north of San Francisco to Napa Valley, and spent a summer honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. He wrote about this experience in The Silverado Squatters. He met Charles Warren Stoddard, co-editor of the Overland Monthly and author of South Sea Idylls, who urged Stevenson to travel to the South Pacific, an idea which would return to him many years later. In August 1880 he sailed with Fanny and Lloyd from New York to Britain and found his parents and his friend Sidney Colvin on the wharf at Liverpool, happy to see him return home. Gradually, his new wife was able to patch up differences between father and son and make herself a part of the new family through her charm and wit.

Attempted settlement in Europe and the U.S.[link]

Stevenson's "Cure Cottage" in Saranac Lake

For the next seven years, between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson searched in vain for a place of residence suitable to his state of health. He spent his summers at various places in Scotland and England, including Westbourne, Dorset, a residential area in Bournemouth. In Westbourne he named his house Skerryvore after the tallest lighthouse in Scotland, which his uncle Alan had built (1838-1844). In the wintertime Stevenson traveled to France and lived at Davos-Platz^[48] and the Chalet de Solitude at Hyères, where, for a time, he enjoyed almost complete happiness. "I have so many things to make life sweet for me," he wrote, "it seems a pity I cannot have that other one thing—health. But though you will be angry to hear it, I believe, for myself at least, what is is best. I believed it all through my worst days, and I am not ashamed to profess it now."^[49] In spite of his ill health, he produced the bulk of his best-known work during these years: Treasure Island, his first widely popular book; Kidnapped; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story which established his wider reputation; The Black Arrow; and two volumes of verse, A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods. At Skerryvore he gave a copy of Kidnapped to his friend and frequent visitor Henry James.^[50]

When his father died in 1887, Stevenson felt free to follow the advice of his physician to try a complete change of climate, and he started with his mother and family for Colorado. But after landing in New York, they decided to spend the winter at Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks at a cure cottage now known as Stevenson Cottage. During the intensely cold winter Stevenson wrote some of his best essays, including Pulvis et Umbra, began The Master of Ballantrae, and lightheartedly planned, for the following summer, a cruise to the southern Pacific Ocean. "The proudest moments of my life," he wrote, "have been passed in the stern-sheets of a boat with that romantic garment over my shoulders."^[51]

Politics[link]

Much like his father, Stevenson remained a staunch Tory for most of his life. His cousin and biographer, Sir Graham Balfour, said that "he probably throughout life would, if compelled to vote, have always supported the Conservative candidate."^[52] During his college years he briefly identified himself as a "red-hot Socialist." By the year 1877, at only twenty-six years of age and before having written most of his major fictional works, Stevenson reflected: "For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men [...] Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better—I dare say it is deplorably for the worse."^[53]

Journey to the Pacific[link]

The author with King Kalākaua. Honolulu, Hawaii, 1889

The author with his wife and their household in Vailima, Samoa, c. 1890

Stevenson's birthday fete at Vailima

Burial on Mount Vaea in Samoa, 1894

Stevenson's tomb on Mt. Vaea c.1909

Head of RLS, Writer's Museum, Edinburgh

In June 1888 Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco and set sail with his family from San Francisco. The vessel "plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help."^[54] The sea air and thrill of adventure for a time restored his health, and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands, where he spent much time with and became a good friend of King Kalākaua. He befriended the king's niece, Princess Victoria Kaiulani, who also had a link to Scottish heritage. He spent time at the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands. During this period he completed The Master of Ballantrae, composed two ballads based on the legends of the islanders, and wrote The Bottle Imp. He witnessed the Samoan crisis. He preserved the experience of these years in his various letters and in his In the South Seas (which was published posthumously),^[55] an account of the 1888 cruise which Stevenson and Fanny undertook on the Casco from the Hawaiian Islands to the Marquesas and Tuamotu islands. An 1889 voyage, this time with Lloyd, on the trading schooner Equator, visiting Butaritari, Mariki, Apaiang and Abemama in the Gilbert Islands, (also known as the Kingsmills) now Kiribati.^[56] During the 1889 voyage they spent several months on Abemama with the tyrant-chief Tem Binoka, of Abemama, Aranuka and Kuria. Stevenson extensively described Binoka in In the South Seas.^[56]

One particular open letter from this period stands as testimony to his activism and indignation at the pettiness of the "powers that be", in the person of a Presbyterian minister in Honolulu named Rev. Dr. Charles McEwen Hyde. During his time in the Hawaiian Islands, Stevenson had visited Molokai and the leper colony there, shortly after the demise of Father Damien. When Dr. Hyde wrote a letter to a fellow clergyman speaking ill of Father Damien, Stevenson wrote a scathing open letter of rebuke to Dr. Hyde.^[57] Soon afterwards, in April 1890, Stevenson left Sydney on the Janet Nicoll for his third and final voyage among the South Seas islands.^[58]

While Stevenson intended to write another book of travel writing to follow his earlier book In the South Seas, it was his wife who eventually published her journal of their third voyage. (Fanny misnames the ship as the Janet Nicol in her account of the 1890 voyage, The Cruise of the Janet Nichol.)^[59] A fellow passenger was Jack Buckland, whose stories of life as an island trader became the inspiration for the character of Tommy Hadden in The Wrecker (1892), which Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne wrote together.^[60][61] Buckland visited the Stevensons at Vailima in 1894.^[62]

Last years[link]

Stevenson's home at Vailima, Samoa showing him on the veranda c.1893

In 1890 Stevenson purchased a tract of about 400 acres (1.6 km²) in Upolu, an island in Samoa. Here, after two aborted attempts to visit Scotland, he established himself, after much work, upon his estate in the village of Vailima. He took the native name Tusitala (Samoan for "Teller of Tales", i.e. a storyteller). His influence spread to the Samoans, who consulted him for advice, and he soon became involved in local politics. He was convinced the European officials appointed to rule the Samoans were incompetent, and after many futile attempts to resolve the matter, he published A Footnote to History. This was such a stinging protest against existing conditions that it resulted in the recall of two officials, and Stevenson feared for a time it would result in his own deportation. When things had finally blown over he wrote to Colvin, who came from a family of distinguished colonial administrators, "I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside the politician!"^[63]

The Stevensons were on friendly terms with some of the colonial leaders and their families. At one point he formally donated, by deed of gift, his birthday to the daughter of the American Land Commissioner Henry Clay Ide, since she was born on Christmas Day and had no birthday celebration separate from the family's Christmas celebrations. This led to a strong bond between the Stevenson and Ide families.^[64][65]

In addition to building his house and clearing his land and helping the Samoans in many ways, he found time to work at his writing. He felt that "there was never any man had so many irons in the fire."^[66] He wrote The Beach of Falesa, Catriona (titled David Balfour in the USA),^[67] The Ebb-Tide, and the Vailima Letters during this period.

For a time during 1894 Stevenson felt depressed; he wondered if he had exhausted his creative vein and completely worked himself out. He wrote that he had "overworked bitterly".^[68] He felt that with each fresh attempt, the best he could write was "ditch-water".^[69] He even feared that he might again become a helpless invalid. He rebelled against this idea: "I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse — ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution."^[70] He then suddenly had a return of his old energy and he began work on Weir of Hermiston. "It's so good that it frightens me," he is reported to have exclaimed.^[71] He felt that this was the best work he had done. He was convinced, "sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little ... take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time."^[72]

Without knowing it, he was to have his wish fulfilled. During the morning of 3 December 1894, he had worked hard as usual on Weir of Hermiston. During the evening, while conversing with his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine, he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that!" He then asked his wife, "Does my face look strange?" and collapsed beside her.^[73] He died within a few hours, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 44. The Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing their Tusitala upon their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea.^[74] Stevenson had always wanted his 'Requiem' inscribed on his tomb:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

However, the piece is misquoted in many places, including his tomb:

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson was loved by the Samoans, and his tombstone epigraph was translated to a Samoan song of grief^[75] which is well-known and still sung in Samoa.

Monuments and commemoration[link]

A bronze relief memorial to Stevenson, designed by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1904, is mounted in the Moray Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh.^[76] Another memorial in Edinburgh stands in West Princes Street Gardens below Edinburgh Castle; it is a simple upright stone inscribed with "RLS - A Man of Letters 1850 -1894" by sculptor Iain Hamilton Finlay in 1987.^[77]

A plaque above the door of a house in Castleton of Braemar asserts 'Here R.L. Stevenson spent the Summer of 1881 and wrote Treasure Island, his first great work'.

A garden was designed by the Bournemouth Corporation in 1957 as a memorial to Stevenson, on the site of his Westbourne house "Skerryvore" which he occupied from 1885 to 1887. A statue of the Skerryvore lighthouse is present on the site.

The Writers' Museum off Edinburgh's Royal Mile devotes a room to Stevenson, containing some of his personal possessions from childhood through to adulthood.

In 1994, to mark the 100th Anniversary of Stevenson's death, the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a series of commemorative £1 notes which featured a quill pen and Stevenson's signature on the obverse, and Stevenson's face on the reverse side. Alongside Stevenson's portrait are scenes from some of his books and his house in Western Samoa.^[78] Two million notes were issued, each with a serial number beginning "RLS". The first note to be printed was sent to Samoa in time for their centenary celebrations on 3 December 1994.^[79]

Modern reception[link]

Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres.^[80] Condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools.^[80] His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned; and The Norton Anthology of English Literature excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st–7th editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006).^[80] The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist.^[80] Even as early as 1965 the pendulum had begun to swing: he was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with H. Rider Haggard of the Age of the Story Tellers.^[81] He is now being re-evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction), and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to Stevenson.^[80] No matter what the scholarly reception, Stevenson remains popular worldwide. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th most translated author in the world, ahead of fellow nineteenth-century writers Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.^[3]

Manuscripts[link]

Half of Stevenson's original manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson's heirs sold Stevenson's papers during World War I; many Stevenson documents were auctioned off in 1918.^[82]

Gallery[link]

• 

  Photographic portrait c.1870s

• 

  Platinum print, 1885, by Albert George Dew-Smith; from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland

• 

  Stevenson paces in his dining room in an 1885 portrait by John Singer Sargent. His wife Fanny, seated in an Indian dress, is visible in the lower right corner.

• 

  Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1887

• 

  Photograph taken by Lloyd Osbourne c.1888

• 

  Portrait by Girolamo Nerli, 1892

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

Scan from Kidnapped. Caption: "Hoseason turned upon him with a flash" (chapter VII, « I Go to Sea in the Brig "Covenant" of Dysart »)

• The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth (1877) Unfinished and unpublished.^[83]
• Treasure Island (1883) His first major success, a tale of piracy, buried treasure, and adventure, has been filmed frequently. In an 1881 letter to W. E. Henley, he provided the earliest known title, "The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island: a Story for Boys".
• Prince Otto (1885) Stevenson’s third full-length narrative, an action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald.
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a novella about a dual personality much depicted in plays and films, also influential in the growth of understanding of the subconscious mind through its treatment of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality.
• Kidnapped (1886) is a historical novel that tells of the boy David Balfour's pursuit of his inheritance and his alliance with Alan Breck in the intrigues of Jacobite troubles in Scotland.
• The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888) An historical adventure novel and romance set during the Wars of the Roses.
• The Master of Ballantrae (1889), a masterful tale of revenge, set in Scotland, America, and India.
• The Wrong Box (1889); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne. A comic novel of a tontine, also filmed (1966).
• The Wrecker (1892); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne.
• Catriona (1893), also known as David Balfour, is a sequel to Kidnapped, telling of Balfour's further adventures.
• The Ebb-Tide (1894); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne.
• Weir of Hermiston (1896). Unfinished at the time of Stevenson's death, considered to have promised great artistic growth.
• St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1897). Unfinished at the time of Stevenson's death, the novel was completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Short story collections[link]

• New Arabian Nights (1882)
• More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885); co-written with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson
• The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887); contains 6 stories.
• Island Nights' Entertainments (also known as South Sea Tales) (1893) contains three longer stories.
• Fables (1896) contains 20 stories: The persons of the tale, The sinking ship, The two matches, The sick man and the fireman, The devil and the innkeeper, The penitent, The yellow paint, The house of Eld, The four reformers, The man and his friend, The reader, The citizen and the traveller, The distinguished stranger, The carthorse and the saddlehorse, The tadpole and the frog, something in it, Faith, half faith and no faith at all, The touchstone, The poor thing, The song of the morrow.

Short stories[link]

List of short stories sorted chronologically. Note: does not include collaborations with Fanny found in More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter.

Other works[link]

• "Béranger, Pierre Jean de", article for the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–89)
• Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1879)
• Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers (1881), contains the essays Virginibus Puerisque i (1876); Virginibus Puerisque ii (1881); Virginibus Puerisque iii: On Falling in Love (1877); Virginibus Puerisque iv: The Truth of Intercourse (1879); Crabbed Age and Youth (1878); An Apology for Idlers (1877); Ordered South (1874); Aes Triplex (1878); El Dorado (1878); The English Admirals (1878); Some Portraits by Raeburn (previously unpublished); Child’s Play (1878); Walking Tours (1876); Pan’s Pipes (1878); A Plea for Gas Lamps (1878).
• Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882) containing Preface, by Way of Criticism (not previously published); Victor Hugo’s Romances (1874); Some Aspects of Robert Burns (1879); The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (1878); Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions (1880); Yoshida-Torajiro (1880); François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker (1877); Charles of Orleans (1876); Samuel Pepys (1881); John Knox and his Relations to Women (1875).
• Memories and Portraits (1887), a collection of essays.
• Aes Triplex (1887)
• Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu (1890)
• Vailima Letters (1895)
• The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire (1995). Based on an 1872 manuscript edited by R. G. Swearingen. California. Silverado Museum.
• Sophia Scarlet (2008). Based on 1892 manuscript edited by Robert Hoskins. AUT Media (AUT University).

Poetry[link]

• A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), written for children but also popular with their parents. Includes such favourites as "My Shadow" and "The Lamplighter". Often thought to represent a positive reflection of the author's sickly childhood.
• Underwoods (1887), a collection of poetry written in both English and Scots.
• Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands (1887). Based on a famous Scottish ghost story.
• Ballads (1891)
• Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

Travel writing[link]

• An Inland Voyage (1878), travels with a friend in a "Rob Roy" canoe from Antwerp (Belgium) to Pontoise, just north of Paris.
• Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), two weeks' solo ramble (with Modestine as his beast of burden) in the mountains of Cévennes (south-central France), one of the first books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities. It tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.
• The Silverado Squatters (1883). An unconventional honeymoon trip to an abandoned mining camp in Napa Valley with his new wife Fanny and her son Lloyd. He presciently identifies the California wine industry as one to be reckoned with.
• Across the Plains (written in 1879–80, published in 1892). Second leg of his journey, by train from New York to California (then picks up with The Silverado Squatters). Also includes other travel essays.
• The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879–80, published 1895). An account of the first leg of his journey to California, by ship from Europe to New York. Andrew Noble (From the Clyde to California: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Emigrant Journey, 1985) considers it to be his finest work.
• The Old and New Pacific Capitals (1882). An account of his stay in Monterey, California in August to December 1879. Never published separately. See, for example, James D. Hart, ed., From Scotland to Silverado, 1966.
• Essays of Travel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905)

Island literature[link]

Although not well known, his island fiction and non-fiction is among the most valuable and collected of the 19th century body of work that addresses the Pacific area.

Non-fiction works on the Pacific[link]

• In the South Seas (1896). A collection of Stevenson's articles and essays on his travels in the Pacific.
• A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892).

Musical compositions[link]

Stevenson was an amateur composer who wrote songs typical of California in the 1880s, salon-type music, entertaining rather than serious. A flageolet player, Stevenson had studied harmony and simple counterpoint and knew such basic instrumental techniques as transposition. Some song titles include "Fanfare", "Tune for Flageolet", "Habanera", and "Quadrille". Robert Hughes in 1968 arranged a number of Stevenson's songs for chamber orchestra, which went on a tour of the Pacific Northwest in that year.

See also[link]

	Poetry portal
	Children's literature portal

	Book: Robert Louis Stevenson
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

• Robert Louis Stevenson State Park
• Victorian literature

References[link]

Secondary literature[link]

• Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, London: Methuen, 1901
• John Jay Chapman "Robert Louis Stevenson", Emerson, and Other Essays. New York: AMS Press, 1969, ISBN 0-404-00619-1 (reprinted from the edition of 1899)
• David Daiches, "Robert Louis Stevenson and his World", London: Thames and Hudson, 1973, ISBN 0-500-13045-0
• J. C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, London: Faber and Faber, 1952
• Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-711321-8 [reviewed by Matthew Sturgis in The Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 2005, page 8]
• James Pope-Hennessy, Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography, London: Cape, 1974, ISBN 0-224-01007-7
• Rosaline Masson, Robert Louis Stevenson. London: The People's Books, 1912
• Rosaline Masson, The life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh & London: W. & R. Chambers, 1923
• Rosaline Masson (editor), I can remember Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh & London: W. & R. Chambers, 1923
• Ernest Mehew, "Robert Louis Stevenson", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: OUP, 2004. Retrieved 29 September 2008
• Roland Paxton, "Stevenson, Thomas (1818-1887)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: OUP, 2004. Retrieved 11 October 2008
• Eve Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1898
• Eve Blantyre Simpson, The Robert Louis Stevenson Originals, [With illustrations and facsimiles], London& Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1912

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Robert Louis Stevenson

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Louis Stevenson

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Louis Stevenson

Works

• Works by or about Robert Louis Stevenson at Internet Archive and Google Books (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by Robert Louis Stevenson at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Works by Robert Louis Stevenson, at the Online Books Page (plain text and HTML)
• Essays by Stevenson at Quotidiana.org
• 151 poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, at Poetry Archive
• "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions", by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Fables, by Robert Louis Stevenson, at The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.
• Works by Robert Louis Stevenson in PDF at Ria Press.
• Stevenson's writings in Scots at ScotsteXt
• Works by or about Robert Louis Stevenson in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Steven's Library, database of books in RLS's library

About

• There are over 200 published biographies of RLS
• Robert Louis Stevenson: a record, an estimate, and a memorial, by Alexander H. Japp
• Robert Louis Stevenson, a biography by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
• Robert Louis Stevenson: a memoir (1895), by Edmund Gosse who knew Stevenson personally
• The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1913) by Graham Balfour, Stevenson's cousin.
• Robert Louis Stevenson: biography (1911), by Edmund Gosse, from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
• Robert Louis Stevenson, biography from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1987
• The bell rock lighthouse and the Stevensons: the history of an old sea tower and a family of engineers

Websites

• The Robert Louis Stevenson Website at Edinburgh Napier University
• Journal of Stevenson Studies
• Robert Louis Stevenson trail GR70
• Silverado Museum, California, devoted to Robert Louis Stevenson
• Robert Louis Stevenson at the Internet Movie Database

B.W. Stevenson (October 5, 1949 - April 28, 1988), born Louis Charles Stevenson, was an American country pop artist, working in a genre now called progressive country. "B.W." stood for "Buckwheat." Stevenson is most famous for his song "My Maria", co-written with Daniel Moore.

He was born in Dallas, Texas and attended W.H. Adamson High School with such other future noted musicians as Michael Martin Murphey, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Larry Groce.

As recorded by Stevenson, "My Maria" became a hit, reaching #9 on Billboard's Hot 100 for the week ending September 29, 1973. The tune was covered much later by the country duo Brooks & Dunn, for whom it was a three-week #1 country hit in mid 1996. Stevenson had several other successful chart singles, including "A Little Bit of Understanding" and the original version of Daniel Moore's "Shambala", which in a cover version by Three Dog Night reached #3. However, Stevenson never again regained the success he had with the release of "My Maria". Stevenson recorded one Contemporary Christian album "Lifeline" produced by Chris Christian that had success on Christian radio with the hit "Headed Home". During the time he recorded "Lifeline", he lived next door to Chris Christian in Beverly Hills, California.

Author Jan Reid devotes a chapter to Stevenson in his book The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, dubbing him "The Voice".

Stevenson died undergoing heart valve surgery at the age of 38. Since his death, Poor David's Pub in Dallas has held an annual songwriting competition in his memory.^[1]

Discography[link]

• 1972 B.W. Stevenson (RCA)
• 1972 Lead Free (RCA)
• 1973 My Maria (RCA)
• 1973 Calabasas (RCA)
• 1975 We Be Sailin' (Warner Bros)
• 1977 The Best of B.W. Stevenson (RCA)
• 1977 Lost Feeling (Warner Bros)
• 1980 Lifeline (Home Sweet Home Records)
• 1990 Rainbow Down the Road (Amazing Records)
• 2000 Very Best of B.W. Stevenson (Collectables)
• 2003 Lead Free/B. W. Stevenson (Collectables)
• 2003 My Maria/Calabasas (Collectables)
• 2005 We Be Sailin'/Lost Feeling (Collectables)

Collaborators[link]

• Larry Carlton: guitar
• Layton DePenning: guitar
• Jim Gordon: drums
• Al DeBoer: drums
• Donny Dolan: drums
• Joe Osborn: bass
• Rod Garrison: bass
• Lorna Willard: backing vocals
• Venata Field: backing vocals
• Chris Christian: guitar, keyboards, backing vocals

References[link]

1. ^ B.W. Stevenson Memorial Songwriting Competition website

External links[link]

• CMT profile
• Oldies.com bio
• B.W. Stevenson at Allmusic
• Bio of B.W. Stevenson including cause of death
• B. W. Stevenson at Find A Grave
• [1]

This article about an American country singer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Zane Grey
Zane Grey holds a koala during a visit to Australia
Born	(1872-01-31)January 31, 1872 Zanesville, Ohio
Died	October 23, 1939(1939-10-23) (aged 67) Altadena, California
Occupation	Novelist, dentist
Nationality	American
Genres	Western fiction

Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the Old West. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book. In addition to the success of his printed works, they later had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and TV productions. As of 2007, 110 films, one TV episode, and a series, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater, had been made that were based loosely on his novels and short stories.^[1]

Biography[link]

Early life and education[link]

Pearl Zane Gray was born January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. It has been suggested that his name derives from the "Pearl Grey" color favored by Queen Victoria in her dress.^{[citation needed]} He was the fourth of five children born to Alice "Allie" Josephine Zane, whose English Quaker immigrant ancestor Robert Zane came to America in 1673, and her husband, Lewis M. Gray, a dentist.^[2] His family changed the spelling of their last name to "Grey" after his birth. Later Grey dropped Pearl and used Zane as his first name. He grew up in Zanesville, a city founded by his maternal great-grandfather Ebenezer Zane, a American Revolutionary War patriot; from an early age, the boy was intrigued by history. Grey developed interests in fishing, baseball, and writing, all which contributed to his writing success.^[3] His first three novels recounted the heroism of his ancestors who fought in the American Revolutionary War.^[4]

As a child, Grey frequently engaged in violent brawls, despite (or because of) his father's punishing him with severe beatings. Though irascible and antisocial like his father, Grey was supported by a loving mother and found a father substitute. Muddy Miser was an old man who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing, and who talked about the advantages of an unconventional life. Despite warnings by Grey’s father to steer clear of Miser, the boy spent much time during five formative years in the company of the old man.^[5]

Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories (Robinson Crusoe and Leatherstocking Tales) and dime novels (featuring Buffalo Bill and "Deadwood Dick"). He was enthralled by and crudely copied the great illustrators Howard Pyle and Frederic Remington.^[6] He was particularly impressed with Our Western Border, a history of the Ohio frontier that likely inspired his earliest novels.^[7] Zane wrote his first story, Jim of the Cave, when he was fifteen. His father tore it to shreds and beat him.^[8] Both Zane and his brother Romer were active, athletic boys who were enthusiastic baseball players and fishermen.^[9]

Due to shame from a severe financial setback in 1889 caused by a poor investment, Lewis Grey moved his family from Zanesville and started again in Columbus, Ohio.^[10] While the older man struggled to re-establish his dental practice, Zane Grey made rural house calls and performed basic extractions, which his father had taught him. The younger Grey practiced until the state board intervened. His brother Romer earned money by driving a delivery wagon.^[11] Grey also worked as a part-time usher in a movie theater and played summer baseball for the Columbus Capitols, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer.^[12] Eventually, Grey was spotted by a baseball scout and received offers from many colleges. Romer also attracted scouts' attention and went on to have a professional baseball career.^[11]

Penn and baseball[link]

At Penn, 1895

Grey chose the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, where he studied dentistry and joined Sigma Nu fraternity; he graduated in 1896. When he arrived at Penn, he had to prove himself worthy of a scholarship before receiving it. He rose to the occasion by coming in to pitch against the Riverton club, pitching five scoreless innings and producing a double in the tenth which contributed to the win.^[13] The Ivy League was highly competitive and an excellent training ground for future pro baseball players. Grey was a solid hitter and an excellent pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curve ball. When the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by ten feet in 1894 (primarily to reduce the dominance of Cy Young’s pitching), the effectiveness of Grey’s pitching suffered. He was re-positioned to the outfield.^[14] The short, wiry baseball player remained a campus hero on the strength of his timely hitting.^[15]

He was an indifferent scholar, barely achieving a minimum average. Outside class he spent his time on baseball, pool, and creative writing, especially poetry.^[13] His shy nature and his teetotaling set him apart from other students, and he socialized little. Grey struggled with the idea of becoming a writer or baseball player for his career, but unhappily concluded that dentistry was the practical choice.

During a summer break, while playing 'summer nines' in Delphos, Ohio, Grey was charged with, and quietly settled, a paternity suit. His father paid the $133.40 cost and Grey resumed playing summer baseball in Delphos. He managed to conceal the episode when he returned to Penn.^[16]

Grey went on to play minor league baseball with several teams, including the Newark, New Jersey Colts in 1898^[17] and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years. His brother, Romer Carl "Reddy" Grey (known as "R.C." to his family) did better and played professionally in the minor leagues. He played a single major league game in 1903 for the Pittsburgh Pirates.^[18]

Dentistry[link]

After graduating, Grey established his practice in New York City under the name of Dr. Zane Grey in 1896. It was a competitive area but he wanted to be close to publishers. He began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice.^[19] He struggled financially and emotionally. Grey was a natural writer but his early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak. Whenever possible, he played baseball with the Orange Athletic Club in New Jersey, a team of former collegiate players that was one of the best amateur teams in the country.^[19]

Grey often went camping with his brother R.C. in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where they fished in the upper Delaware River. When canoeing in 1900, Grey met seventeen year-old Lina Roth, better known as "Dolly". Dolly came from a family of physicians and was studying to be a schoolteacher.^[20]

Marriage and family[link]

After a passionate and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels, Grey and Dolly married five years later in 1905. Grey suffered bouts of depression, anger, and mood swings, which affected him most of his life. As he described it, “A hyena lying in ambush—that is my black spell! I conquered one mood only to fall prey to the next...I wandered about like a lost soul or a man who was conscious of imminent death."^[21]

During his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, "But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that....But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good". He added, "I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women."^[22]

The Zane Grey Museum in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania

After they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career. They moved to a farmhouse at the convergence of the Delaware and Lackawaxen rivers, in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where Grey's mother and sister joined them. (This house, now preserved and operated as the Zane Grey Museum, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) Grey finally ceased his dental practice to devote full-time to his nascent literary pursuits. Dolly’s inheritance provided an initial financial cushion.^[23]

Writing career[link]

While Dolly managed Grey's career and raised their three children, including son Romer Zane Grey, over the next two decades Grey often spent months away from the family. He fished, wrote and spent time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of his behavior, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice. Throughout their life together, he highly valued her management of his career and their family, and her solid emotional support. In addition to her considerable editorial skills, she had good business sense and handled all his contract negotiations with publishers, agents, and movie studios. All his income was split fifty-fifty with her; from her "share", she covered all family expenses.^[24] Their considerable correspondence shows evidence of his lasting love for her despite his infidelities and personal emotional turmoil.^{[citation needed]}

The Greys moved to California in 1918. In 1920 they settled in Altadena, California, where Grey bought a prominent mansion on East Mariposa Street, known locally as "Millionaire's Row". Designed by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey (no relation to the author), the 1907 Mediterranean-style house is acclaimed as the first fireproof home in Altadena, built entirely of reinforced concrete as prescribed by the first owner's wife. Grey summed up his feelings for the city: "In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living."^{[cite this quote]} (The city uses it in promotions.)

It was in Altadena that he spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro. The two met while hiking Eaton Canyon. Of her he wrote, "I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her...her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild."^{[citation needed]}

With the help of Dolly’s proofreading and copy editing, Grey gradually improved his writing. His first magazine article, "A Day on the Delaware", a human-interest story about a Grey brothers’ fishing expedition, was published in the May 1902 issue of Recreation magazine.^[25] Elated by selling the article, Grey offered reprints to patients in his waiting room.^[26] In writing, Grey found temporary escape from the harshness of his life and his demons. “Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.”^[27] By this time, he had given up baseball.^[28]

Grey read Owen Wister’s great Western novel The Virginian. After studying its style and structure in detail, he decided to write a full-length story.^[27] Grey had difficulties in writing his first novel, Betty Zane (1903). When it was rejected by Harper & Brothers, he lapsed into despair.^[29] The novel dramatized the heroism of an ancestor who had saved Fort Henry. He self-published it, perhaps with funds provided by his wife Dolly or his brother R. C.'s wealthy girlfriend Reba Smith.^[30] From the beginning, vivid description was the strongest aspect of his writing.^[31]

After attending a lecture in New York in 1907 by Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, western hunter and guide who had co-founded Garden City, Kansas, Grey arranged for a mountain lion-hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.^[32] He brought along a camera to document his trips and prove his adventures. He also began the habit of taking copious notes, not only of scenery and activities but of dialogue.^[33] His first two trips were arduous, but Grey learned much from his compatriot adventurers. He gained the confidence to write convincingly about the American West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him. He wrote, “Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work.”^[34]

Upon returning home in 1909, Grey converted his experiences into a new book, The Last of the Plainsmen, describing the adventures of Buffalo Jones. Harper’s editor Ripley Hitchcock rejected it, the fourth work in a row. He told Grey, “I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.”^[35] Grey wrote dejectedly, "I don’t know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want...I am full of stories and zeal and fire...yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false".^[36] The book was later published by Outing magazine, which provided Grey some satisfaction. Grey next wrote a series of magazine articles and juvenile novels.^{[citation needed]}

With the birth of his first child pending, Grey felt compelled to complete his next novel and his first Western, The Heritage of the Desert. He wrote it in four months in 1910. It quickly became a bestseller. Grey took his next work to Hitchcock again; this time Harper published his work, an historical romance in which Mormon characters were of central importance.^[34] Grey continued to write popular novels about Manifest Destiny, the conquest of the Old West, and the behavior of men in elemental conditions.^{[citation needed]}

Two years later Grey produced his best-known book, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), his all-time best-seller, and one of the most successful Western novels of all.^[37] Hitchcock rejected it, but Grey took his manuscript directly to the vice president of Harper, who accepted it. As Zane Grey had become a household name, after that, Harper eagerly received all his manuscripts. Other publishers caught on to the commercial potential of the Western novel. Max Brand and Ernest Haycox were among the most notable of other authors of Westerns.^[38] Grey's publishers paired his novels with some of the best illustrators of the time, including N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Douglas Duer, Herbert W. Dunton, W. H. D. Koerner, and Charles Russell.^[39]

Grey had the time and money to engage in his first and greatest passion: fishing. From 1918 until 1932, he was a regular contributor to Outdoor Life magazine. As one of its first celebrity writers, he began to popularize big-game fishing. Several times he went deep-sea fishing in Florida to relax and to write in solitude.^[40] Although he commented that, “the sea, from which all life springs, has been equally with the desert my teacher and religion,” Grey was unable to write a great sea novel.^[41] He felt the sea soothed his moods, reduced his depressions, and gained him the opportunity to harvest deeper thoughts:

“The lure of the sea is some strange magic that makes men love what they fear. The solitude of the desert is more intimate than that of the sea. Death on the shifting barren sands seems less insupportable to the imagination than death out on the boundless ocean, in the awful, windy emptiness. Man’s bones yearn for dust.”^[39]

Over the years, Grey spent part of his time traveling and the rest of the year wrote from the base of his adventures. Unlike writers who could write every day, Grey would have dry spells and then sudden bursts of energy, in which he could write as much as 100,000 words in a month.^[42] He encountered fans in most places. He kept a cabin on the Rogue River in Oregon. Other excursions took him to Washington state and Wyoming.^[43]

From 1923 to 1930, he spent a few weeks a year at his cabin on the Mogollon Rim, in Central Arizona. After years of abandonment and decay, the cabin was restored in 1966 by Bill Goettl, a Phoenix air conditioning magnate, and was opened to the public as a free-of-charge museum. The Dude Fire destroyed the cabin in 1990. It was later reconstructed 25 miles away in the town of Payson.^[43]

During the 1930s, Grey continued to write, but the Great Depression hurt the publishing industry. His sales fell off and he found it more difficult to sell serializations. Having avoided the stock market crash, he continued to earn royalty income. In the 1930s, nearly half of the film adaptations of his novels were made.^[44]