Owen Wister - External links and references

Writer, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA. He graduated from Harvard (1882) before studying music composition in Paris (1882–4). Suffering from ill health, he spent summers in the American West, and these visits profoundly affected his future writing. He studied law at Harvard (1885–8), and settled in Philadelphia, where he practised law. By 1891 he devoted himself to writing biographies, essays, and novels, and is remembered for his Western novels, notably The Virginian (1902), a book containing the prototype of the American cowboy in subsequent fictions and films.

Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 – July 21, 1938) was an American writer of western novels. Owen Wister was born of old money in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a number of place names around Philadelphia can be traced back to the Wister family. Wister practiced law in Philadelphia before devoting himself to writing. In 1898 he married Mary Channing Wister, his cousin, and had six children.

It was Wister's Wild West writing that brought him to international attention. To get away from Eastern life, Wister often went out West to Wyoming, still fairly wild in the 1880s and 1890s and was there when the famous Johnson County War took place in 1892). His most famous work is The Virginian, the loosely constructed story of a cowboy who is a natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War and taking the side of the large land owners.

Books and stories:

Hank's Woman The Virginian Lady Baltimore Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship

Poetry:

Done In The Open

External links and references

Article in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wister Books and Writers: Owen Wister Works by Owen Wister at Project Gutenberg