One Summer: America, 1927

Philo Farnsworth and was part of his earliest patent.

C HAPTER 28
     

     
    MOST OF US , given a pad of paper, a pencil and a few minutes to think, could come up with a reasonably respectable list of writers who were at work in the 1920s: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound and so on.
    It is unlikely, however, that many of us would think to include the name of Harold Bell Wright. Yet Wright was more popular than any of the people on the list above and may well have had greater lifetime sales than all of them put together. In 1925 when the first printing of his novel A Son of His Father came off the presses in Chicago, it filled twenty-seven railway boxcars. His 1911 book The Winning of Barbara Worth was so beloved that fans named a hotel, a road and a school after it. Wright’s books were sentimental and predictable – they invariably concerned a person who had been buffeted by life’s travails, but then found happiness and success through hard work and Christian fellowship – but people couldn’t get enough of them.
    Much the same could be said of a great many other writers whose names have long since slipped into obscurity. Cosmo Hamilton, Arthur Somers Roche, Coningsby Dawson, T. S. Stribling, Hervey Allen, Stark Young, Hermann Keyserling, Warwick Deeping, Thyra Samter Winslow, Knut Hamsun, Julia Peterkin,Gene Stratton-Porter, Zona Gale and Mazo de la Roche all enjoyed greater sales, and often greater fame, than any of the better remembered authors of the 1920s.
    None, however – not even Harold Bell Wright at full, emotive throttle – could begin to compare with the success of two other American authors whose books sold and sold for decades. They were Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs and they were almost certainly the two most popular authors on the planet in the twentieth century.
    They had a good deal in common. Both were from the Midwest, both came comparatively late to professional writing – Grey at thirty, Burroughs at thirty-five – and even later to success, and both were by almost any measure pretty terrible writers. The wonder is not that they are no longer widely read, but that they ever were. Of Grey, the critic Burton Rascoe wrote: ‘It is difficult to imagine any writer having less merit in either style or substance than Grey and still maintaining an audience at all.’ Burroughs was largely spared such insults because as a pulp writer he wasn’t deemed worthy of even scornful notice. But the world devoured their output. Nobody knows how many books they sold – estimates range, rather wildly, from 25 million apiece up to 60 million or so if translations, posthumous publications and book-length magazine publications are counted in. Whatever the actual total, for both it was unquestionably a gratifyingly large number.
    Grey, in an interestingly secretive way, was much the more intriguing of the two. Newspaper and magazine profiles in his lifetime portrayed him as a pleasant and unassuming dentist from Ohio who wrote adventure stories in his spare time, hit pay dirt in 1912 with Riders of the Purple Sage , then cranked out a succession of highly popular books, mostly westerns, over a period of nearly thirty years. He invented, or at the very least cornered the market in, many of the conventions of the genre – the black-hearted villain, the bullied rancher and his chaste, pretty daughter, the strong, silent cowboy ‘whose heart belongs to no femalesave his warm-nosed mare’, as one writer once nicely put it.
    But Grey had a great secret. In private, he was spectacularly libidinous. An ardent outdoorsman, he often went on long trips into the wilderness with attractive, high-spirited young women – his wife’s two young cousins, friends of the family, casual acquaintances – and slept with them all. Sometimes he took as many as four at a time away with him. Occasionally he brought them home with him afterwards. As his biographer Thomas H. Pauly reports: ‘There exists an enormous, totally unknown cache of photographs taken by Grey of nude women and himself performing various sexual activities, including intercourse … These photographs are accompanied by ten small journals, written in Grey’s secret code, that contain graphic descriptions of his sexual adventures.’
    In between these invigorating breaks Grey lived quietly with his wife, a woman of stoic temperament, in