He once threw a beefsteak out the dining room window because it was not cooked to his liking. The writer's mother was the daughter of Fanny Kemble, a well-known actress and friend of such European celebrities as Sir Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Browning, and Felix Mendelssohn and of such Americans as historians William H. Prescott and John Lothrop Motley, naturalist Louis Agassiz, and writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Sarah Butler was an intellectual who spoke several languages, played the piano well, translated the poetry of Alfred de Musset into English, and wrote unsigned articles for the
Atlantic Monthly. She was, according to Fanny Wister, "very much aware ... she was a personage." Owen Wister 's mother was the great intellectual force in his life, but her strong personality tended to overshadow his own.
Wister received a patrician education which included short stints in Swiss, English, and Germantown private schools. At thirteen he entered St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire. While there he wrote his first published story, "Down in a Diving Bell", which appeared in the school magazine. In 1878, after five years at St.
This is a free page. This page contains 196 words. This
biography contains 4,973 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Owen Wister Access Pass.
