The Washington Post, January 9th, 2000
Owen Wister, a 25-year-old, Harvard-educated and somewhat sickly lawyer from Philadelphia, went west for his health and came away amazed by the Wyoming he discovered in 1885. After several trips to the frontier over a 15-year period, Wister felt somewhat better -- he lived until 1938 -- and set out to make use of the copious diaries he'd written detailing the colorful characters he had found in Medicine Bow. The result was his 1902 novel, "The Virginian." The book, regarded as the first Western novel, laid down a template for Western storytelling that would endure for the rest of the century. ...
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