Zane Grey, Carl Jung and the Journey of the Hero

Zane Grey, an American of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was one of the first writers of ‘Westerns’. His novels about the American West have become classics of popular literature. Few if any critics would care to call Grey a great writer; much of his writing is embarrassingly bad by the usual literary standards. But countless readers, unconcerned with his lack of critical acclaim, have devoured his work.

Many of his more than 80 books have been best-sellers, and his work was frequently serialised between 1912 and 1940 in popular magazines with wide circulation. Following his first big commercial success, Riders of the purple sage in 1912, new work was regularly published until long after his death. Old works have been reprinted. Paperback editions are available for most of his more than 50 Westerns.1 At least 98 films have been made, based on his novels.

During Grey's lifetime his audience included many different sorts of people, both men and women, the relatively unlettered and the well-educated, working-class people and professionals (GRUBER 6, pp. 14, 157, 162). His novels have been translated into a number of foreign languages, the foreign editions enjoying wide sales.

Any book liked by great numbers of people might be assumed to have some universal quality which contributes to its wide appeal. Carl Jung writes about the fundamental similarities among images that evoke strong emotions in people. Jung calls these ‘archetypal images’, and sees them as an expression of the collective unconscious. Many of Grey's Western novels contain archetypal images. Wanderer of the wasteland, more than any of Grey's other work, displays, in the unfolding of its hero's story, a striking similarity in structure and content to what Jung and others have identified as the archetypal journey of the hero (CAMPBELL 1, RANK 25).2

Jung says in a brief definition of the collective unconscious:

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly per