![]() ![]() (I counted six uses of the word purple in the first page and a quarter.) I began to wonder if this book was the origin of the phrase “purple prose.” This ambient sexual tension is all I remembered about the book from my first pubescent encounter with it. ![]() Perhaps this is why the sage is so continuously purple. To me it seems more like a romance novel set in the West. Wikipedia says that this is the book on which the Western genre was founded. Because I hadn’t read it since I was around twelve, I remembered very little. The Paris Review asked if I would write something about Riders. Presumably these were considered wholesome. Some, like The Grapes of Wrath, were forbidden-but I was allowed to read Gone with the Wind and Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Only a few books were available in my household, and I read whatever I could get my hands on. ![]() Here, Rae Armantrout revisits Zane Grey’s novel Riders of the Purple Sage.Īs I mentioned in my Art of Poetry interview in The Paris Review’s Winter issue, my mother loved Westerns, especially Zane Grey. Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. ![]()
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