Author. He received fame as an American author, who is credited with his novels and short stories being adapted into 112 films, two television episodes, and a 1950s television series, "Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre." Born Pearl Zane Grey, the fourth of five children of a destitute dentist, his mother's ancestors were pioneers of his hometown of Zanesville. On a baseball scholarship, he graduated from dental school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 and moved to New York City to open a practice. He was a self-taught author. Since his first book "Betty Zane" was rejected by several publishers, he published the book privately in 1904 with great success. In 1908, he made his first trip to the Western United States and began writing stories about the Old West. His best-known Western novel was the 1912 "Riders of the Purple Sage," which sold over twelve million copies and was adapted to film three times. After relocating to California by 1910, he spent his life writing. During his lifetime, sixty of his works were published, with almost as many more published after his death. He sold over seventeen million books and is known as a pioneer in literature's Western genre. He became one of the first authors in the United States to become a millionaire. In 1905, he married a school teacher, Lina "Dolly" Roth, who supported his career as a proof writer. The couple had three children. After touring most of the Wild West in the United States, he spent the last ten years of his life traveling to islands of the South Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia, enjoying outdoor sports such as fly fishing and deep-sea fishing. Among his nonfiction works is the 1925 "Tales of Fishing." After years of fighting depression, he died of heart failure. Among his numerous accolades, he was inducted in 1977 into the Hall of Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Museum. With his son and wife finishing his works, about thirty posthumous novels were published with some being sequels of earlier successful novels or accumulations of earlier short stories. Many of these posthumous novels were in print in the last quarter of the 20th century. All of his books were translated into Spanish. Into the 21st century, the devoted members of Zane Grey's West Society preserve his memory.