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Owen Wister Biography

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About 17 pages (4,973 words)
Owen Wister Summary

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Name: Owen Wister
Birth Date: July 14, 1860
Death Date: July 21, 1938
Nationality: American
Gender: Male

Dictionary of Literary Biography on 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 over sixty short stories, some of which provided the beginnings for his novels Lin McLean (1898) and The Virginian. All but a few of Wister's stories were about the American West, and, appearing in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Cosmopolitan, they helped to transform the region into a subject respectable enough for "quality" slick magazine fiction.

Wister was the only child of Sarah Butler and Owen Jones Wister. According to the writer's daughter, Fanny Wister, her grandparents' household in Germantown, Pennsylvania, was "intensely intellectual" and their relationship "temperamental." From a family of prosperous merchants, the father was a practical and hardworking country doctor known for his quick wit and temper.

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    Michael Butler, University of Kansas|William E. Grant, Bowling Green State University. Owen Wister from Dictionary of Literary Biography. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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