The Virginian (100th Anniversary)

Owen Wister

Apr 2002 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

His background is shadowy, his presence commanding. He brings law and order to a frontier town and wins the love of a pretty schoolteacher from the East. He is the Virginian—the first fully realized cowboy hero in American literature, a near-mythic figure whose idealized image has profoundly influenced our national consciousness. This enduring work of fiction marks his first appearance in popular culture—the birth of a legend that lives with us still.

About the author

Owen Wister was born in Philadelphia in 1860, the son of a prominent Philadephia physician. After graduating from Harvard, studying music in Paris, and starting work in a New York bank, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to recuperate at a Wyoming ranch. This was Wister’s first contact with the American West and the first of many visits there. Returning East, he pursued a successful career as a lawyer, enjoyed close friendships with such notable figures as Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote of his experiences and feelings about the American West in articles and stories that reached their high point in The Virginian in 1902. An immediate and enduring bestseller, the novel was to be Wister’s major contribution to American literature. He died in 1938.

Max Evans is best known for his novel The Rounders, which was made into a film starring Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda in 1965, and The Hi-Lo Country, which also became a film in 1998.