(The epic novel of the American West and the heroic cowboy...)
The epic novel of the American West and the heroic cowboy Owen Wister's powerful story of the tall, silent stranger who rides into the uncivilized West and defeats the forces of evil has become an enduring part of American mythology.
Owen Wister was an American author and historian. He was best known as the "father" of western fiction.
Background
Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia. Wister was the son of a physician, also named Owen Wister, who was known for the readiness of both his wit and his temper. Wister’s mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was the daughter of the renowned actress Fanny Kemble. With a mother who was an accomplished pianist as well as a writer for the Atlantic Monthly and a translator of French poetry into English, Wister grew up displaying inclinations toward both music and literature, which his father urgently attempted to suppress. His childhood was unhappy, in the view of Julian Mason in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and overshadowed by the formidable personalities of his parents.
Education
Wister was educated in some of the finest Northeastern and European schools, he also studied at St. Paul’s School in Concord. At Harvard University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in music (with highest honors) in 1882, he had a comic novel, The New Swiss Family Robinson, serialized in the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. At Harvard, he made influential friendships, particularly with young Theodore Roosevelt. Wister did go back east, to enroll in Harvard Law School, from which he graduated as a Bachelor of Laws in 1888.
Practicing law in Philadelphia beginning in 1889, Wister initiated a pattern of living and working in the east and vacationing in the west.
Although Wister’s Western stories were conventional in form and sentiment, he worked at them with tremendous energy, devoting his spare time to research and to the quest for material. In 1893, he renounced his law practice in order to write a series of thrilling Western tales for Harper's. The stories he gathered during the next ten years were to become the material for the collections Red Men and White (1896) and The Jimmy John Boss and Other Stories (1900), as well as the episodic novels Lin McLean (1898) and The Virginian (1902).
In 1902, his novel The Virginian—portions of which had been previously published in Harper’s— appeared in book form and became an instant bestseller. With more than a million and a half hardback copies moving off the shelves in its author’s lifetime, it has remained popular both in print and in its numerous screen versions, the most famous of which starred Gary Cooper in 1929. (The long-running television series of the 1960s, The Virginian, was a distant adaptation as well.) The estimate of hardback sales as of 1981 was two million; paperback sales added still more.
Wister’s next novel appeared four years later, and was not the sequel to The Virginian that his editors had unsuccessfully badgered him to produce; instead, it was Lady Baltimore, a study of Charleston society which has been called, by Joseph M. Flora in the Reference Guide to American Literature, a “Jamesian comedy of manners”.
Well-ensconced in eastern and southeastern society, Wister stopped visiting the West, and his output of fiction diminished after 1911, ceasing altogether in 1928. The Teens and Twenties of the twentieth century saw him producing essays; in 1930, he wrote a successful book about his long friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. Other luminaries Wister knew personally or corresponded with included Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Ernest Hemingway.
Wister has been seen as a significant figure mainly for historical rather than purely literary reasons; critics including Bernard De Voto and Leslie A. Fiedler have been troubled, moreover, by the author’s embracing of violence as a moral solution in The Virginian. There is little question, however, that Wister’s bestseller has influenced Americans not only as entertainment but as a vision of the popular faith in a romanticized West.
Achievements
Wister is remembered primarily as a writer of Western stories, and in particular of one Western novel, The Virginian (1902), which set forth many of the modern character and plot formulas for that genre. Several of Wister's novels were adapted as films.
The University of Wyoming Student Publications has been publishing the literary and arts magazine Owen Wister Review since 1978.
Wister was a member of the American Academy and an honorary member of the Society of Letters in Paris, as well as an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London.
Connections
Wister married his cousin Mary Charming in 1898, who, before dying of childbirth in 1913, gave him six children - Mary Channing, Owen Jones, Frances Kemble, William Rotch, Charles Kemble and Sarah Butler. Mary was attentive to Wister's happiness. Mary Channing Wister enabled years of productivity in her husband’s life.
Owen Wister
This continuing series, primarily regional in nature, provides brief but authoritative introductions to the lives and works of authors who have written significant literature about the American West.
