| Though
he made his name and his
fortune as an author of Western novels, Zane Grey's best writing has to
do with fishing. There he was free from the conventions of the Western
genre and the expectations of the market, and he was able to blend his
talent for narrative with his keen eye for detail and humor, much of it
self-deprecating, into books and articles that are both informative and
exciting.
His
first published fishing article
appeared in 1902, and he continued to write books and articles on
angling
until his death in 1939. From the trout streams and bass rivers of the
East to the steelhead rivers of the Northwest; from the offshore
angling
of Nova Scotia and California to the unexplored waters of New Zealand
and
the South Sea islands, Grey was constantly in motion, sometimes fishing
three hundred days a year, always writing to support his passion. At
one
time or another he held more than a dozen saltwater records, yet he
always
returned from the big game to the freshwater streams he had learned to
love as a boy.
This
book is a selection of some
of Grey's best work, and the stories and excerpts reveal a man who
understood
that angling is more than an activity--it is a way of seeing, a way of
being more fully a part of the natural world. No writer exceeds Zane
Grey's
ability to integrate the fishing experience with a world he saw so
vividly.
|
Zane Grey on
Fishing
edited
by Terry Mort
Lyons
Press, 2005
Order
a copy.
Captives
of the Desert
|
