About the Joseph L. Wheeler research notes on Zane Grey

In the summer of 2009 the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University acquired the personal research collection of Zane Grey scholar Joseph L. Wheeler. This collection includes hundreds of books, magazines, movie posters, manuscripts, photographs, photocopies, an extensive file of research note cards, and other Zane Grey material collected by Wheeler over a 40 year period from the late 1960s to 2009.

This database provides access to a portion of that collection, namely the 6,000 plus research cards created by Wheeler over his long career of research and writing on Grey. The note cards include references to Grey’s books and other publications (often including long quotes), correspondence with family, publishers, editors and others, personal diary entries, notes on the publications of different editions of his novels, reactions to film adaptations of his works, data on Grey’s fishing records, and other miscellaneous information on the life of Zane Grey.

The site constitutes an electronic version of Wheeler’s research note cards which have been transcribed into a database that allows for comprehensive searching in four different ways. 1) search over all fields of the database at once (Keyword All), 2) search just the Source field, 3) just the Notes field, or 4) just the Subject term field.

The Source field includes mostly the title of one of his books or the date of a letter or diary entry.

The Notes field includes mostly notes or quotations from the book, article or letter cited in the Source field..

The Subject term field includes mostly terms chosen by Wheeler regarding the subject matter contained in the Notes field.

Following a search, clicking on one of the results brings up the entire contents of the original note card formatted by data fields. By clicking a term in any of the fields will bring up all other entries which contain that particular term.