Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, "combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture," Riders of the Purple Sage is a classic of the Western genre. It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane's grounds. "[Zane Grey's] popularity was neither accidental nor undeserved," wrote Nye. "Few popular novelists have possessed such a grasp of what the public wanted and few have developed Grey's skill at supplying it."