The Virginian
- Written By Owen Wister
The Virginian
- Owen Wister
$19.99
When you call me that, smile!
A tenderfoot from the East steps off the train in Wyoming Territory and falls in with a soft-spoken Southerner who will forever change his sense of the frontier. Known to everyone simply as “the Virginian,” this cowboy carries himself with an easy calm that hides something formidable beneath: a private code of honor he will defend at any price.
While the Virginian courts Molly Wood, a strong-willed schoolteacher newly arrived from Vermont, his long quarrel with the outlaw Trampas hardens toward a reckoning. Their feud gives American fiction one of its most famous lines and carries the story toward a showdown on a dusty street that writers and filmmakers would spend the next century imitating.
Published in 1902 and dedicated to American President Theodore Roosevelt, The Virginian is widely honored as the first true Western and the source of nearly every convention the genre came to cherish: the quiet gunman, the code of the range, the walkdown at high noon. It launched a form that Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, and Hollywood at large would carry around the world, and it endures as the cornerstone on which the whole mythology of the American West was built.
Step into the dusty boots and gritty codes of the Wild West in the latest edition of The Virginian, now reprinted for a new generation of readers.
About the Author
- Owen Wister
Owen Wister was born in 1860 into a wealthy Philadelphia family and educated at Harvard, where he befriended the future president Theodore Roosevelt. Initially seeking a career in music, he studied composition in Paris for two years, writing six operas during the time. However, once none of them were produced, he gave up on the dream and returned home to earn a law degree and enter practice. A recurring nerve illness sent him west in 1885 to recover his health on a Wyoming ranch; living amongst the rough western lifestyle enchanted Wister, and he developed an obsession with the cowboys, soldiers, outlaws, and general gruffness of the Wild West.
Over the years that followed, Wister made repeated journeys through Wyoming and the wider West, filling notebooks with the speech, characteristics, and codes of conduct he observed among cowboys and cattlemen. He shaped that material into magazine stories and, eventually, into the novel that made him famous. The Virginian, published in 1902 and dedicated to his friend Roosevelt, became one of the best-selling books of its era, never once going out of print.
Wister went on to write other fiction, such as Lady Baltimore (1906), before focusing on historical biographies of famed figures like Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant. Although his work continued to gain acclaim, nothing matched the impact of his masterpiece. He passed away in Rhode Island in 1938, yet is remembered as the writer who gave the American Western its enduring signature style.
