More significantly, his awareness of the frontier as something unique in the collective human experience helped to propel his country into a global contest of letters then dominated by Emile Zola and Count Leo Tolstoy.
Nothing in his early life heralded Wister as the founder of an entertainment industry that would launch the careers of artists as disparate as Ernest Haycox, William S. Hart, Willa Cather, and John Wayne. Born in Philadelphia on 14 July 1860 to Owen J. Wister, a physician, and Sarah Butler Wister, a socialite, Owen Wister early displayed talents that seemed to destine him for a career in music. He graduated from Harvard with honors in 1882, then studied musical composition in Paris, where he attracted the attention of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, but was forced to return to the United States for reasons of health. Several biographers cite a disagreement between Wister's mother, daughter of the flamboyant actress Fanny Kemble, and his father, a stolid professional man of old Pennsylvanian stock, over whether their son belonged in business or the arts for his subsequent nervous collapse.
If the accounts are true, the argument was a fortunate one.
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