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...

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...

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...

Owen Wister was one of a long line of lawyer-writers in American literary history. This Pennsylvania-born, Harvard-educated patrician became one of America's first and most prominent writers of the Western genre. Popular in his own time, Wister...

Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 – July 21, 1938) was an American writer of western novels. Owen Wister was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician. His mother,...

G. Edward White has written that Owen Wister (1860-1938) belonged to two different worlds: that of the Eastern Establishment and that of the Western Experience. It is the Western Experience for which he is most noted. In 1885, after he went to a...

Owen Wister, a 25-year-old, Harvard-educated and somewhat sickly lawyer from Philadelphia, went west for his health and came away amazed by the Wyoming he discovered in 1885. After several trips to the frontier over a 15-year period, Wister felt somewhat better -- he...

In the following essay, Boatwright critiques the image of the cowboy as hero, particularly in the works of Owen Wister.