The Vanishing American

By: Zane Grey

Narrated by: Jim Gough

Considered one of Zane Grey's best novels, The Vanishing American was originally published in serialized form in the Ladies Home Journal in 1922. It reveals Grey's empathy for the Native American and his deep concern for the future survival of that culture.

It is the story of Nophaie, a young Navajo, who is picked up by a party of whites at the age of seven. White parents bring the child up as though he were their own, eventually sending him to a prestigious Eastern college where he distinguishes himself by his outstanding athletic skill. The Vanishing American is about Nophaie's struggle to find a place in society. On a larger scale it is about all Native Americans and their future in America.

(P)1922

Meant exceedingly well, but ...

Zane Grey wrote The Vanishing American after undoubtedly a great deal of research. This is a story of an Indian boy stolen from his tribe by well-meaning white people. He is educated in the east (where is excels as a great athlete), then returns to his native lands as a young man to find the reservation more and more corrupt, his people being mistreated and lied to at all times, and he in the middle - feeling half-white and half-Indian, feeling that he neither really belongs to either.

The novel highlights the failure of the reservation system, the corruption all the way up to Washington from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the workings of Indian agents and missionaries. But it pairs these hard truths with the creation of a larger-than-life hero that just so over the top gives us "the noble savage," that idealized picture that was painted so often back then. To make matters worse - or to take matters further away from the aforementioned hard truths, Grey gives us a white heroine who has fallen madly in love with him, and he with her. All of that just feels ... wrong. That same man, that same story, without the idealism and romance, would have made this a powerful novel.

There's our hero fighting the system, there he is rediscovering himself, there he is trying to help, to even get his tribal relations to join in WWI (where more than 10'000 Indians did, in fact, volunteer - a main reason for it being that they were hoping that it would finally give them US citizenship and thus basic rights), there's our hero in a stunningly beautiful part of the world. That, without a doubt, is a wonderful strength of the novel - it feels like about half of it is spent on describing valleys, canyons, deserts, mesas, ridges, etc. - those descriptions are beautiful, vivid, full of color, full of senses.

As mentioned in the title, I've no doubt that this novel was exceedingly well-meant - but it was written in a way, with that noble savage frame, that was just far from realistic. I've read that the novel was actually written in serialized form in "Ladies' Home Journal" - and it really does feel like the novel was trying its best to tell a meaningful and important story, while at the same time giving its initial audience a hero to fawn over and a heroine to vicariously live through,