Owen Wister

Owen Wister, best novels

Owen Wister (1860 - 1938) was an American writer and "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian, although he never wrote about the West afterwards. Wister's most famous work remains the 1902 novel The Virginian', a complex mixture of person(s), places and events dramatized from experience, word of mouth, and his own imagination ultimately creating the cowboy who is was natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War and taking the side of the large landowners. In this book: The Virginian Lin McLean Red Men and White