

The Zorro we have come to know and love wasn't a product so much of birth as of evolution.

(The screenplay to the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro ingeniously turns Zorro into the avenging brother of Joaquin Murieta.) But the Scarlet Pimpernel fought for the aristocracy, while Zorro fought against the aristocracy on behalf of the common man he was an outlaw and almost certainly was modeled, at least in part, on the legendary California bandit Joaquin Murieta, whose head supposedly was preserved in a jar for more than half a century until it vanished in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. No one is sure exactly who inspired the character Zorro, though the Baroness Emmuska Orezy's Scarlet Pimpernel, the masked Englishman who battled French revolutionary fanatics, was a likely candidate. McCulley moved to Southern California in 1908 and picked up something of the color and lore of the provincial times, though nothing at all of its history. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.The character of Zorro - "fox" in Spanish - originated not in Mexico or Spain but in the mind of a New York journalist and pulp writer named Johnston McCulley. After many adventures - duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues - Diego de la Vega, a.k.a.

He soon joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor.īetween the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Spain, a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule. His father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner his mother, a Shoshone warrior. 2005 "First Edition" stated on copyright page SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page to previous owner Sarah Harper Collins Publishers, New York hardbound in red and black boards with silver lettering along spine very good condition with unmarked pages dust jacket very good.Ī swashbuckling adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is a child of two worlds.
