The complete online text of Lin McLean by Owen Wister.

Although best known for The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), a novel often credited--if inaccurately--with being "the first Western," Owen Wister was in talent and predilection perhaps more a short-story writer than a novelist. He produced ove...

The importance of Owen Wister to the literature of the American West--and, by extension, to the development of American literature in the twentieth century--cannot be overstated. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) lifted the frontier story ou...

Owen Wister is most often thought of, not inappropriately, as a writer about the American West. Indeed, his stories and books were extremely important in establishing in the 1890s and early twentieth century the ideas held by the majority of people about...