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 Western life and landscape. He is often credited with establishing through his Western fiction the typical cowboy hero and villain, along with some other cowboy character types and certain basic formulas for involving them in cultural or moral conflicts, all of which became prevalent (usually with less success) first in twentieth-century popular fiction and later in movies and on radio and television. However, while his Western writing was his most important and most influential both on readers and on other writers, his Philadelphia and family heritages led to other successes for him in both fiction and nonfiction.

Wister was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (a suburb of...