Owen Wister

Biography

Owen Wister (1860–1938) was an American novelist who created the Western genre with his novel The Virginian (1902), one of the best-selling American novels of the early 20th century. Born in Germantown, Philadelphia, into a wealthy and cultivated family—his grandmother was the actress Fanny Kemble—Wister was educated at Harvard, where he was a classmate and lifelong friend of Theodore Roosevelt. He studied music in Europe before entering Harvard Law School, but repeated visits to Wyoming for health reasons transformed his literary ambitions. The landscapes and characters of the American West captivated him, and he began publishing Western stories in Harper’s Magazine. The Virginian, dedicated to Roosevelt, synthesized these elements into the prototype of the Western novel: a laconic, chivalrous cowboy hero, a schoolteacher love interest from the East, a climactic showdown with a villain, and the vast Wyoming landscape as moral backdrop. The novel established conventions that would define Western fiction, film, and television for over a century. Wister also wrote other fiction, including the novel Lady Baltimore (1906), and political and historical nonfiction.