I'm not much of a "Western" reader. But, this was Zane Grey's first book so I thought I'd give it a try. It turned out to be an interesting story. I "read" it as a book on tape. The reader of the book on tape was able to change his voice for each character so the result was like a "radio play". Very enjoyable!
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There are two basic styles of English prose. One is that of Dashiell Hammett - short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters, short novels. The other basic style is that of Charles Dickens - long passages of minute, detailed description. Zane Grey wrote in this second style, and he did it very well indeed. The American West comes alive in the pages of this book, a true classic. Calling this "purple prose" is like calling the music of the Grateful Dead "boogie" - it's a putdown that doesn't really mean anything. (Incidentally, a Grateful Dead offshoot band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, was named after this book.) Just as Alice chased a rabbit into Wonderland, so Venters chases a rabbit into Surprise Valley. He discovers true spirituality in the natural world and in other people - not in organized, denominational religion. The theme of this novel is that tyrannical fanaticism - religious and/or political - is dangerous and wrong. Grey was not specifically anti-Mormon. In fact, some of his Mormon charactors were good people. He was against any religious system that was out of control in its lust for power. Think of todays' "religious right", or for that matter, Islamic extremism. Grey would have disliked both.

The book came at a timely fashion. It was in great condition and it looked brand new. The book was just as described.

I love the freedom and the grandeur Zane Grey brought to even his shortest story, and while RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE is dated, you can practically smell the saguaro lingering on every page, like mold, except with a fresher scent. As many other reviewers have noticed, the book is rife with anti-Mormon sympathies and it sort of does for members of the Latter Day Saints what BIRTH OF A NATION does for black people--i.e., no favors. What will Mormons make of a story which casts one of them as the heroine and all the others as a bunch of low class, scurvy thieving swine with nothing better on their minds than "wiving" and basically swindling poor Jane out of her wonderful ranch in the Cottonwoods of Utah.

Instead Jabe winds up crossing the line and falling for a "Gentile," the cowboy Lassiter who wields a six shooter and rides like the wind. She abdicates her place in respectable society to become "infamous, notorious," as she sobs out on the purple plain, "a rustler's girl and nothing more."

The two of them share a common love for children and the West, which Lassiter tries to hide behind his mask of not caring a damn for any person, place, thing or religion. His cold, hard impassivity becomes a screen on which Jane projects her romantic and sexual feelings, which are echoed daily and nightly in Grey's remarkable prose, a splashy palette of colors and earth tones. It won't take you long to rip through this romantic thriller, but you too will be amazed by the sympathetic treatment Zane Grey gives to his heroine, even though she slips through the fingers of morality like a jet of clear sparkling water from the Cottonwood River. Her life of sin is not total debauchery however, for she remains chaste, and lets the landscape, especially its canyons, reveal her pulsating desires.