Of the many authors who participated in the creation of the popular Western, one of the most important was Zane Grey. Although few of the elements of the Western formula were original with Grey, he brought them together in a way that kept him on the best-seller lists for many years and made him a model for countless successors and imitators. In more than eighty books Grey honed the image of the Western hero alone against the odds, competent with gun and fist, perhaps clad in black, eligible for romance, and governed by "the code of the West"--a higher law that put him on a moral plane above the sometimes corrupt institutions of civilization and justified the violence he felt obligated to commit. Grey 's descriptions of colorful and exotic Southwestern locales, whether northern Arizona's Oak Creek Canyon or southern Utah's Rainbow Bridge, are unforgettably vivid and...