How the Humble Paperback (in the Armed Services Editions) Helped Win World War II ( and chose to shun Zane Grey )

 

How the Humble Paperback Helped Win World War II

A new exhibition tells the story of the Armed Services Editions, pocket-size paperback weapons in the fight for democracy

 

The program avoided titles that insulted America’s allies, or disparaged any particular group. Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage,” for example, was canceled over concern with a character’s reference to deceitful Mormon bishops. But overall, the program took care to present a variety of books, and avoid any appearance of censorship.

 This is hitting me hard because I have written two chapters about Mormon murder of several of my cousins at the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. In the late 1940s THE RIDERS OF PURPLE SAGE was a book I read over and over again. I was unaware that it had been censored. 

Long afterward the 1940s I saw that Stephen Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE had been cut by Ripley Hitchcock. Crane critics were outraged at me. How dare I suggest that imperfections in the texts they were celebrating made nonsense of a few passages? They clutched the censored text to their bosoms. They were New Critics!

 In 2007 Jon Tuska published Grey's SHOWER OF GOLD which had been changed by Ripley Hitchcock to DESERT GOLD. Tuska wrote:: "Ripley Hitchcock was Zane Grey's editor at Harper & Bros. He was an editor who inflicted his personal agenda on authors. Prior to working for Harper & Bros., he had been an editor at D. Appleton. It was Hitchcock who had rejected Stephen Crane's novel of a woman of the streets, Maggie, and it was Hitchcock who would completely transform Crane's The Red Badge of Courage into the opposite of what the author had written. Hershel Parker, in an essay titled "Getting Used to the 'Original Form' of The Red Badge of Courage" (1986), has detailed just how Hitchcock worked. 

Tuska knew that what I described was just what Hitchcock did with Zane Grey.

Now, more years passed. I wrote an article with a funny title, "The Talented Ripley Hitchcock."

On 9 January 2011 Jon Tuska wrote me. "Thank you so much for making your article on Ripley Hitchcock available to me. I knew you could do such an article so much better than I could. I am sending a copy of it to the publisher at Five Star to share its contents with her and others on her staff. Years ago, when we started these Zane Grey restorations, I told Loren Grey that I thought in time they would make a difference when it came to the critical evaluation of Zane Grey among literary critics and scholars. Your fine article is certainly a step in this direction, bringing attention to the important fact that there is a definite difference in the texts of what Zane Grey originally wrote and what Harper & Bros. published. . . ."

I was extremely busy in the 1970s but one of the regrets of my life is that I did not seek a visit with Loren Grey over in the Valley.