Owen Wister (born July 14, 1860, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 21, 1938, North Kingstown, Rhode Island) was an American novelist whose novel The Virginian (1902) helped establish the cowboy as a folk hero in the United States and the western as a legitimate genre of literature. The Virginian is the prototypical western novel and, arguably, the work most responsible for the romanticized view of the West that is an important part of American cultural identity.
Wister was an unlikely champion of the American West. He was born into privilege, to an Eastern family of considerable means. His father was an affluent doctor and his mother one of the daughters of famous English actress Fanny Kemble. He also had ties to the aristocracy of the American South; his great-grandfather was Pierce Butler, a delegate from South Carolina to the Constitutional Convention (1787).
Wister was educated at boarding schools in New England and Switzerland, graduated from Harvard in 1882, and then studied musical composition in Paris for two years. Ill health forced his return to the United States, and for purposes of recuperation he spent the summer of 1885 in Wyoming. In the fall Wister entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 1888, and, after being admitted to the bar in 1889, he practiced for two years in Philadelphia. He continued to spend his summers in the West, and in 1891, after the enthusiastic acceptance by Harper’s of two of his Western sketches, he devoted himself to a literary career.
The Virginian is the story of an unnamed cowboy who, despite his hardened exterior, displays the “civilized” values of chivalry and honour in the “uncivilized” environment of the West. The book was an immediate best seller and made Wister a wealthy man. It solidified the cowboy as a stock fictional character and introduced story lines now considered standard in westerns, such as the virginal heroine, a schoolteacher from the East, and her rough cowboy lover, who depends for his life on a harsh code of ethics. The book also reflects the theme of sectional reconciliation—the cowboy is a Southerner-turned-Westerner who courts the Easterner—so common in post-Civil War American fiction. The book’s climactic gun duel is considered the first such “showdown” in fiction, and the book is the source of one of the most famous tough-guy admonitions in American popular culture: “When you call me that, smile!” Although 21st-century critics often criticize the book’s romanticism, sentimentality, and myth-making about the West, few deny its extraordinary influence: it was one of the first mass-market best sellers in the United States; it was the first western to receive critical acclaim; and it was later the basis of a play, several films, and television series.
Wister’s other major works include Lady Baltimore (1905), a number of books for children, and Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919 (1930), detailing his long acquaintance with Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard classmate, to whom Wister dedicated The Virginian. (Western artist Frederic Remington was also a lifelong friend.) Wister’s collected writings were published in 11 volumes in 1928. His journals and letters from 1885 to 1895 were published in Owen Wister Out West (1958), edited by his daughter, Fanny Kemble Wister.