The Last Days of Zane Grey

(Paperback)

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'Utterly absorbing! Vicki Hastrich's deeply perceptive portrait of writer Zane Grey recovers a kind of twentieth-century Captain Ahab in a rip-roaring tale of obsession, money and high adventure.'
Grace Karskens, Emeritus Professor of History, author of People of the River


Zane Grey was the world's first millionaire author, inventor of the Western in both literature and Hollywood films, globally feted as a celebrity adventurer. There was a time when Zane Grey movies - sometimes three a week - were screening in every tiny Australian country town, but until now his adventures in Australia have been little known.

Grey first sailed to Australia in the mid-1930s to pursue the new sport of game fishing, but behind the scenes, he was in financial trouble. While chasing world records in game fishing at Bermagui and showing Australians how to create new industries from their marine resources, Grey also scrambled to protect his precarious finances by making the first everJawsmovie, White Death, at Queensland's Hayman Island.

Amid all the drama that followed him, Grey was also on a singular quest to test himself against an epic-sized great white shark - leading to the fight of his life in the wild seas of Port Lincoln.

In the tradition of Grey's own dramatic westerns, Vicki Hastrich's biography is an exhilarating story with all the glamour of Hollywood: a tale of a new frontier, heroic battles with giant sea creatures; romance, adultery - and the cast of intelligent, headstrong women who surrounded and supported Grey his whole career. It is also a grand portrayal of Australian and American dreams and the human relationship with our ocean wilderness - and brings a missing part of Australia's history into dazzling light.

Author Bio

Vicki Hastrich is a Sydney writer. Her two novels, Swimming with the Jellyfish (2001) and The Great Arch (2008) were followed by the memoir Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the singular life (2019). Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, critic Beejay Silcox has called Night Fishing 'the literary equivalent of a glass-bottomed boat, a frame for wonderment'. Her 2025 biography The Last Days of Zane Grey examines the life of the American western writer, celebrity and big game-fisherman via the untold story of Zane Grey's two trips to Australia in the 1930s.