The strong family ties and various cultural interests of the family of his mother, Sarah Butler Wister, the daughter of the famous actress Fanny Kemble and a minor writer herself, were to have strong influences upon his personality, interests, and tastes all of his life. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a doctor and a member of a prominent family, so Wister grew up in somewhat genteel circumstances which in most ways hardly seem to anticipate his later interest in the frontier West. He attended, among other schools, a boarding school at Hofwyl, Switzerland (1870-1871), an English school while he was living with the family of his mother's sister (1871-1872), Germantown Academy (1872), and Saint Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire (1873-1878), where he published in the school magazine his first story and also poems and essays. After an unhappy boyhood, he attended Harvard University (1878-1882), from which he received an A.B. with honors in philosophy and English composition and highest honors in music. There he also made lasting and useful friendships with a number of people who were later prominent, most notably Theodore Roosevelt. Harvard was followed by a year in Paris to study composition and to explore possibilities for a career in music.
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