"Grey, Zane - The Last Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grey Zane)

Even to-day it is not possible to travel into the remote corners of
the West without seeing the lives of people still affected by a
fighting past. How can the truth be told about the pioneering of
the West if the struggle, the fight, the blood be left out? It cannot
be done. How can a novel be stirring and thrilling, as were those
times, unless it be full of sensation? My long labors have been
devoted to making stories resemble the times they depict. I have
loved the West for its vastness, its contrast, its beauty and color
and life, for its wildness and violence, and for the fact that I
have seen how it developed great men and women who died unknown
and unsung.

In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age
of realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no
place for romance itself. For many years all the events leading up
to the great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly
realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another
name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not
worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed
so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo;
and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson,
particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People
live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone
who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied
wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul.
How strange indeed to find that the realists have ideals and dreams!
To read them one would think their lives held nothing significant.
But they love, they hope, they dream, they sacrifice, they struggle
on with that dream in their hearts just the same as others. We all
are dreamers, if not in the heavy-lidded wasting of time, then in the
meaning of life that makes us work on.

It was Wordsworth who wrote, "The world is too much with us"; and if
I could give the secret of my ambition as a novelist in a few words
it would be contained in that quotation. My inspiration to write has
always come from nature. Character and action are subordinated to
setting. In all that I have done I have tried to make people see how
the world is too much with them. Getting and spending they lay waste
their powers, with never a breath of the free and wonderful life of
the open!

So I come back to the main point of this foreword, in which I am
trying to tell why and how I came to write the story of a feud
notorious in Arizona as the Pleasant Valley War.

Some years ago Mr. Harry Adams, a cattleman of Vermajo Park, New Mexico,
told me he had been in the Tonto Basin of Arizona and thought I might
find interesting material there concerning this Pleasant Valley War.
His version of the war between cattlemen and sheepmen certainly
determined me to look over the ground. My old guide, Al Doyle of