In 1936, the celebrated American author Zane Grey arrived in the sleepy New South Wales town of Bermagui, with the express reason of angling for the world's largest fish - Marlin, sharks and Swordfish. Here is his little classic of the chase. Four miles out I sighted a long sickle fin cutting through a swell. Did I yell, "Marlin!"? I certainly did. An instant later Peter sighted another farther out, and this tail fin belonged to a large fish. I could not tell whether or not it indicated a black marlin. It stood up three feet or more, and that much would make a tail spread of over six feet. These marlin were riding the swells and they were moving fast. The tails would come up out of the top of a swell and cut the water at more than a ten-knot speed. Then they would vanish. It is always necessary to run the boat in the right direction to head the fish off. The Avalon is fast - she can do eighteen knots when opened up - but we could not catch up with the big fellow.

Australia brings to mind images of the Great Barrier Reef, great white sharks, huge crocodiles and friendly people. Zane Grey fished everywhere, but he often found himself lured back to the Pacific especially around Australia and New Zealand. Most of the fish caught in An American Angler in Australia are sharks (great white, tiger, even a few carpet!) but you can't go big game fishing in Australia and not expect to be teased by marlins.

Famous western author Zane Grey documents his fishing excursions in Australia. And don't miss Grey's companion volume, "Tales of the Angler's El Dorado, New Zealand," available in a matching edition.

Stories by a master storyteller recapture an era of wild adventures, legendary sportsmen, and rugged landscapes in some of the world's most exotic locales.

Though he made his name and his fortune as an author of Western novels, Zane Grey's best writing has to do with fishing. There he was free from the conventions of the Western genre and the expectations of the market, and he was able to blend his talent for narrative with his keen eye for detail and humor, much of it self-deprecating, into books and articles that are both informative and exciting. His first published fishing article appeared in 1902, and he continued to write books and articles on angling until his death in 1939. From the trout streams and bass rivers of the East to the steelhead rivers of the Northwest; from the offshore angling of Nova Scotia and California to the unexplored waters of New Zealand and the South Sea islands, Grey was constantly in motion, sometimes fishing three hundred days a year, always writing to support his passion. At one time or another he held more than a dozen saltwater records, yet he always returned from the big game to the freshwater streams he had learned to love as a boy. This book is a selection of some of Grey's best work, and the stories and excerpts reveal a man who understood that angling is more than an activity-it is a way of seeing, a way of being more fully a part of the natural world. No writer exceeds Zane Grey's ability to integrate the fishing experience with a world he saw so vividly.