The Waste Land^[A] is a 434-line^[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century."^[1] Despite the poem's obscurity^[2]—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures—the poem has become a familiar touchstone of modern literature.^[3] Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and (its last line) the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih."^[C]

Composition history[link]

Writing[link]

Eliot probably worked on what was to become The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In a letter to New York lawyer and patron of modernism John Quinn dated 9 May 1921, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish."^[4]

Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country. While walking through a graveyard, they started discussing Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success."^[5]

Eliot, having been diagnosed with some form of nervous disorder, had been recommended rest, and applied for three months' leave from the bank where he was employed; the reason stated on his staff card was "nervous breakdown". He and his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, travelled to the coastal resort of Margate for a period of convalescence. While there, Eliot worked on the poem, and possibly showed an early version to Ezra Pound when, after a brief return to London, the Eliots travelled to Paris in November 1921 and were guests of Pound. Eliot was en route to Lausanne, Switzerland, for treatment by Doctor Roger Vittoz, who had been recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell; Vivienne was to stay at a sanatorium just outside Paris. In Lausanne, Eliot produced a 19-page version of the poem.^[6] He returned from Lausanne in early January 1922. Pound then made detailed editorial comments and significant cuts to the manuscript. Eliot would later dedicate the poem to Pound.

Manuscript drafts[link]

Eliot sent the manuscript drafts of the poem to John Quinn in October 1922; they reached Quinn in New York in January 1923.^[D] Upon Quinn's death they were inherited by his sister, Julia Anderson. Years later, in the early 1950s, Mrs Anderson's daughter, Mary Conroy, found the documents in storage. In 1958 she sold them privately to the New York Public Library.

It was not until April 1968 that the existence and whereabouts of the manuscript drafts were made known to Valerie Eliot, the poet's second wife and widow.^[7] In 1971, Faber and Faber published a "facsimile and transcript" of the original drafts, edited and annotated by Valerie Eliot. The full poem prior to the Pound editorial changes is contained in the facsimile.

Editing[link]

The drafts of the poem reveal that it originally contained almost twice as much material as the final published version. The significant cuts are in part due to Ezra Pound's suggested changes, although Eliot himself is also responsible for removing large sections.

The now famous opening lines of the poem—'April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, ...'—did not appear until the top of the second page of the typescript. The first page of the typescript contained 54 lines in the sort of street voice that we hear again at the end of the second section, A Game of Chess. This page appears to have been lightly crossed out in pencil by Eliot himself.

Although there are several signs of similar adjustments made by Eliot, and a number of significant comments by Vivien, the most significant editorial input is clearly that of Pound, who recommended many cuts to the poem.

'The typist home at teatime' section was originally in entirely regular stanzas of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of abab—the same form as Gray's Elegy, which was in Eliot's thoughts around this time. Pound's note against this section of the draft is "verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it". In the end, the regularity of the four-line stanzas was abandoned.

At the beginning of 'The Fire Sermon' in one version, there was a lengthy section in heroic couplets, in imitation of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. It described one lady Fresca (who appeared in the earlier poem "Gerontion"). As Richard Ellmann describes it, "Instead of making her toilet like Pope's Belinda, Fresca is going to it, like Joyce's Bloom." The lines read:

Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,

Fresca slips softly to the needful stool,

Where the pathetic tale of Richardson

Eases her labour till the deed is done . . .

Ellmann notes "Pound warned Eliot that since Pope had done the couplets better, and Joyce the defecation, there was no point in another round."

Pound also excised some shorter poems that Eliot wanted to insert between the five sections. One of these, that Eliot had entitled 'Dirge', begins

Full fathom five your Bleistein lies^[I]

Under the flatfish and the squids.

Graves' Disease in a dead Jew's eyes!

Where the crabs have eat the lids

. . .

At the request of Eliot's wife, Vivienne, a line in the A Game of Chess section was removed from the poem: "And we shall play a game of chess/The ivory men make company between us / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door". This section is apparently based on their marital life, and she may have felt these lines too revealing. However, the "ivory men" line may have meant something to Eliot: in 1960, thirteen years after Vivienne's death, he inserted the line in a copy made for sale to aid the London Library, of which he was President at the time; it fetched £2,800^{[citation needed]}. Rupert Hart-Davis had requested the original manuscript for the auction, but Eliot had lost it long ago (though it was found in America years later).^[8]

In a late December 1921 letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the poem, Pound wrote a bawdy poem of 48 lines titled "Sage Homme" in which he identified Eliot as the mother of the poem but compared himself to the midwife.^[9] The first lines are:

These are the poems of Eliot

By the Uranian Muse begot;

A Man their Mother was,

A Muse their Sire.

How did the printed Infancies result

From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?

If you must needs enquire

Know diligent Reader

That on each Occasion

Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.

Publishing history[link]

Before the editing had even begun Eliot found a publisher.^[E] Horace Liveright of the New York publishing firm of Boni and Liveright was in Paris for a number of meetings with Ezra Pound. At a dinner on 3 January 1922 (see 1922 in poetry), he made offers for works by Pound, James Joyce (Ulysses) and Eliot. Eliot was to get a royalty of 15% for a book version of the poem planned for autumn publication.^[10]

To maximize his income and reach a broader audience, Eliot also sought a deal with magazines. Being the London correspondent for The Dial magazine^[11] and a college friend of its co-owner and co-editor, Scofield Thayer, the Dial was an ideal choice. Even though the Dial offered $150 (£34)^[12] for the poem (25% more than its standard rate) Eliot was offended that a year's work would be valued so low, especially since another contributor was found to have been given exceptional compensation for a short story.^[13] The deal with the Dial almost fell through (other magazines considered were the Little Review and Vanity Fair) but with Pound's efforts eventually a deal was worked out where, in addition to the $150, Eliot would be awarded the Dial magazine's second annual prize for outstanding service to letters. The prize carried an award of $2,000 (£450).^[14]

In New York in the late summer (with John Quinn, a lawyer and literary patron, representing Eliot's interests) Boni and Liveright made an agreement with The Dial where the magazine would be the first to publish the poem in the US by agreeing to purchase 350 copies of the book at discount from Boni and Liveright.^[15] Boni and Liveright would use the publicity of the award of the Dial's prize to Eliot to increase their initial sales.

The poem was first published in the UK, without the author's notes, in the first issue (October 1922) of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot. The first appearance of the poem in the US was in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine (actually published in late October). In December 1922, the poem was published in the US in book form by Boni and Liveright, the first publication to print the notes. In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in an edition of about 450 copies, the type handset by Virginia Woolf.

The publication history of The Waste Land (as well as other pieces of Eliot's poetry and prose) has been documented by Donald Gallup.^[16]

Eliot, whose 1922 salary at Lloyds Bank was £500 ($2,215)^[17] made approximately £630 ($2,800) with the Dial, Boni and Liveright and Hogarth Press publications.^[18][F]

Title[link]

Eliot originally considered titling the poem He do the Police in Different Voices.^[19] In the version of the poem Eliot brought back from Switzerland, the first two sections of the poem—'The Burial of the Dead' and 'A Game of Chess'—appeared under this title. This strange phrase is taken from Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend, in which the widow Betty Higden says of her adopted foundling son Sloppy, "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices." Some critics use this working title to support the theory that, while there are many different voices (speakers) in the poem, there is only one central consciousness. What was lost by the rejection of this title Eliot might have felt compelled to restore by commenting on the commonalities of his characters in his note about Tiresias.

In the end, the title Eliot chose was The Waste Land. In his first note to the poem he attributes the title to Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. The allusion is to the wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent sterility of his lands. To restore the King and make his lands fertile again the Grail questor must ask "What ails you?" A poem strikingly similar in theme and language called Waste Land, written by Madison Cawein, was published in 1913.^[20]

The poem's title is often mistakenly given as "Waste Land" (as used by Weston) or "Wasteland", omitting the definite article. However, in a letter to Ezra Pound, Eliot politely insisted that the title begin with "The".^[21]

Structure[link]

The epigraph and dedication to The Waste Land showing some of the languages that Eliot used in the poem: Latin, Greek, English and Italian.

The poem is preceded by a Latin and Greek epigraph from The Satyricon of Petronius. In English, it reads: "I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die."

Following the epigraph is a dedication (added in a 1925 republication) that reads "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro" Here Eliot is both quoting line 117 of Canto XXVI of Dante's Purgatorio, the second cantica of The Divine Comedy, where Dante defines the troubadour Arnaut Daniel as "the best smith of the mother tongue" and also Pound's title of chapter 2 of his The Spirit of Romance (1910) where he translated the phrase as "the better craftsman."^[22] This dedication was originally written in ink by Eliot in the 1922 Boni & Liveright paperback edition of the poem presented to Pound; it was subsequently included in future editions.^[23]

The five parts of The Waste Land are titled:

1. The Burial of the Dead
2. A Game of Chess
3. The Fire Sermon
4. Death by Water
5. What the Thunder Said

The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting to explain his metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these notes are helpful in interpreting the poem, but some are arguably even more puzzling, and many of the most opaque passages are left unannotated. The notes were added after Eliot's publisher requested something longer to justify printing The Waste Land in a separate book.^[G] Thirty years after publishing the poem with these notes, Eliot expressed his regret at "having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail".^[24]

There is some question as to whether Eliot originally intended The Waste Land to be a collection of individual poems (additional poems were supplied to Pound for his comments on including them) or to be considered one poem with five sections.

The structure of the poem is also meant to loosely follow the vegetation myth and Holy Grail folklore surrounding the Fisher King story as outlined by Jessie Weston in her book From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston's book was so central to the structure of the poem that it was the first text that Eliot cited in his "Notes on the Waste Land."

Style[link]

The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue. This interest dates back at least as far as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Of course, "The Waste Land" is not a single monologue like "Prufrock." Instead, it is made up of a wide variety of voices (sometimes in monologue, dialogue, or with more than two characters speaking).

The style of the poem overall is marked by the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts (classic and obscure; "high-brow" and "low-brow") that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. In addition to the many "high-brow" references and/or quotes from poets like Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, Eliot also included a couple of references to "low-brow" genres. A good example of this is Eliot's quote from the 1912 popular song "The Shakespearian Rag" by lyricists Herman Ruby and Gene Buck.^[25] There were also a number of low-brow references in the opening section of Eliot's original manuscript (when the poem was entitled "He Do The Police in Different Voices"), but they were removed from the final draft after Eliot cut this original opening section.^[26]

"The Waste Land" is notable for its seemingly disjointed structure, indicative of the Modernist style of James Joyce's Ulysses (which Eliot cited as an influence and which he read the same year that he was writing "The Waste Land").^[27] In the Modernist style, Eliot jumps from one voice or image to another without clearly delineating these shifts for the reader. He also includes phrases from multiple foreign languages (Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French and Sanskrit), indicative of Pound's influence.

Sources[link]

Sources from which Eliot quotes, or to which he alludes, include the works of: Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid,^[28] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Gérard de Nerval, Thomas Kyd, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conrad, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, Oliver Goldsmith, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker.

Eliot also makes extensive use of Scriptural writings including the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire Sermon, and of cultural and anthropological studies such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (particularly its study of the Wasteland motif in Celtic mythology). Eliot wrote in the original head note that "Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L Weston"^[H]The symbols Eliot employed, in addition to the Waste Land, include the Fisher King, the Tarot Deck, the Perilous Chapel, and the Grail Quest.

See also[link]

• 1922 in poetry, year of first publication

References[link]

Notes[link]

Citations[link]

Cited works[link]

• Aldington, Richard (1941). Life for Life's Sake. The Viking Press. 
• Bush, Ronald (1991). T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39074-5. 
• Eliot, T.S. (1961) "The Frontiers of Criticism" in On Poetry and Poets. New York: Noonday Press.
• Eliot, T. S. (1971) The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound Edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot, Harcourt Brace & Company, ISBN 0-15-694870-2
• Eliot, T. S. (1988) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1. Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich
• Eliot, T. S. (1986) "The Frontiers of Criticism" in On Poetry and Poets London: Faber and Faber Ltd., London ISBN 0-571-08983-6
• Eliot, T.S. (2001). The Waste Land. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-97499-5. 
• Forster, E.M. (1964). Abinger Harvest. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.. http://crab.rutgers.edu/~barbares/New%20Modernism/Criticism/Forster,%20T.S.%20Eliot.pdf. 
• Gallup, Donald (1969). T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. 
• Gordon, Lyndall (2000). T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32093-6. 
• Officer, Lawrence H. (2008) "Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate From 1791", MeasuringWorth.com
• Pound, Ezra (2005). The Spirit of Romance. New Directions. ISBN 0-8112-1646-2. 
• Rainey, Lawrence (2005). Revisiting the Waste Land. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10707-2. 
• Wilhelm, James J. (1990). Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-00682-X. 
• Weidmann, Dirk. And I Tiresias have foresuffered all: More Than Allusions to Ovid in T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land?. In: LITERATURA 51 (3), 2009, pp. 98–108.
• Williamson, Samuel H. (2007) "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790 - 2006," MeasuringWorth.Com

Primary sources[link]

• Eliot, T. S. (1963). Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ISBN 0-15-118978-1. 
• The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot, annotated and edited by Valerie Eliot. (Faber and Faber, 1971) ISBN 0-571-09635-2 (Paberback ISBN 0-571-11503-9)

Secondary sources[link]

• Ackroyd, Peter (1984). T. S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-11349-0. 
• Bedient, Calvin (1986). He Do the Police in Different Voices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-04141-7. 
• Bloom, Harold (2003). Genius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-69129-1. 
• Brooker, Jewel; Joseph Bentley (1990). Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 0-87023-803-5. 
• Drew, Elizabeth (1949). T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
• Gish, Nancy (1988). The Waste Land: A Student's Companion to the Poem. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-8023-8. 
• Miller, James (1977). T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01237-4. 
• Moody, A. David (1994). The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42127-6. 
• North, Michael (2000). The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-97499-5. 
• Reeves, Gareth (1994). T. S. Eliot's the Waste Land. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0-7450-0738-4. 
• Southam, B. C. (1996). A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. ISBN 0-15-600261-2. 

External links[link]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Waste Land

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: The Waste Land

Poem itself

• The Waste Land at Project Gutenberg
• Complete annotated poem

Annotated versions

• Critical essay on The Waste Land @ the Yale Modernism Lab
• Exploring "The Waste Land"
• Hypertext version of The Waste Land with sources

Recordings

• Audio of T.S. Eliot reading the poem
• Free audiobook from LibriVox
• BBC audio file. Discussion of The Waste Land and Eliot on BBC Radio 4's programme In our time.

v t e T. S. Eliot Early poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady "Preludes" Gerontion The Waste Land The Hollow Men Ash Wednesday Ariel Poems The Journey of the Magi Later poems Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats "Bustopher Jones" "Gus: The Theatre Cat" "Growltiger's Last Stand" Burnt Norton East Coker The Dry Salvages Little Gidding Four Quartets Plays Sweeney Agonistes The Rock Murder in the Cathedral The Family Reunion The Cocktail Party The Confidential Clerk The Elder Statesman Prose Selected Essays, 1917-1932 "Hamlet and His Problems" "Tradition and the Individual Talent" The Sacred Wood "The Frontiers of Criticism" People E. Martin Browne Eliot family Valerie Eliot Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot Ezra Pound Jean Jules Verdenal William Butler Yeats Publishing The Criterion Faber and Faber

Look up wasteland in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wasteland or Waste Land may refer to:

Literature[link]

• Wasteland (mythology), the Celtic motif of the land of the Fisher King
• The Waste Land, a poem by T. S. Eliot
• The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, a novel by Stephen King
• Wasteland (Block novel), a novel by Francesca Lia Block
• Wasteland (comics), a post-apocalyptic comic book written by Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten
• Wasteland (Warhammer), a fictional region in the world of Warhammer Fantasy
• Wasteland (DC Comics), a 1987 horror/humor comic book anthology written by John Ostrander and Del Close
• Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a 2008 anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction
• "Wastelands", a 2002 short story by Stephen Dedman

Games[link]

• Wasteland (video game), a computer role-playing game
  • Wasteland 2, the upcoming sequel to the above game.

Film and television[link]

• Wasteland Speech, a 1961 speech by FCC chairman Newton N. Minow in which he compares television to "a vast wasteland"
• Wasteland (TV series), an American television drama, debuted in 1999
• Teenage Wasteland (film), 2006 film written and directed by Welsh director Andrew Jones
• Waste Land (film), 2010 documentary about Brazilian trash-pickers and an artist who changed their lives.

Music[link]

• "Wasteland" (Maxïmo Park song), on the War Child charity album Help: A Day in the Life
• "Wasteland" (10 Years song), a 2005 single by rock band 10 Years
• "Wastland", a song by The Mission UK
• "Wasteland" (Billy Idol song), a 1993 single by Billy Idol from the Cyberpunk album
• "Wasteland" (Poison song), a song by Poison from their 2002 album Hollyweird
• "Wasteland" (The View song), a song by The View from their debut album Hats Off to the Buskers
• "The Wasteland" (Elton John song), a song by Elton John from his album Songs From The West Coast
• Wasteland (Atargatis album), an album by Atargatis
• Wasteland (The Jam album), a 1992 album by The Jam
• The Waste Lands (album), an album by Venom
• "Baba O'Riley", the 1971 song by the English rock band The Who, is often called "Teenage Wasteland" after the phrase repeated throughout the song
• "Wasteland," a song by Trapt from their 2008 album Only Through the Pain

Other[link]

• Waste, unproductive land on a manor.

See also[link]

Waste products from mining and refining are often deposited as tailings or spoil tips. These areas are sometimes called wastelands. The corollary is land reclamation and land rehabilitation.

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

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]