Owen Wister


Owen Wister was an American writer. His novel The Virginian, published in 1902, helped create the cowboy as a folk hero in the United States and built Wister's reputation as the "father of Western fiction." He was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame. The Western Writers of America renamed the Saddleman Award for best book of the year to the Owen Wister Award, and Mount Wister in Wyoming was named in his honor.

Early life and education

Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician raised at "Butler Place" which adjoined Belfied, the Wister family estate in Germantown. His mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was the daughter of Fanny Kemble, a British actress.
Wister attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Britain. He studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1878. He was a member of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Wister was also a member of the Porcellian Club, through which he became friends with Theodore Roosevelt. As a senior, Wister wrote the Hasty Pudding's then most successful show, Dido and Aeneas, whose proceeds aided in the construction of their theater. Wister graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1882.
He studied for two years at a Paris conservatory and wrote six operas. They were never produced and he gave up his dream of a career in music. He worked briefly in a bank in New York before studying law; he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1888 and passed the bar in 1890. He practiced with a Philadelphia firm but was never truly interested in that career.

Career

In 1882, Wister started his writing career with the publication of The New Swiss Family Robinson, which parodied the 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson. It was well received and Mark Twain wrote a letter to Wister with his praise of the work.
Wister traveled to the American West to improve his health due to an illness that caused him hallucinations, headaches, and vertigo. In 1885, he was a guest of Frank Wolcott, at the VR Ranch near Douglas, Wyoming, and became enchanted with the beauty of the West and the rough characters such as stage coach drivers, gamblers, cowboys, and soldiers he met.
In 1891, Wister began to write fictional stories of western life based on the people he met and the stories he heard. He traveled to the West for almost every summer over the next 15 years to gather additional material for his books. His most famous work was the 1902 novel The Virginian, a complex mixture of persons, places and events dramatized from experience, word of mouth, and his own imagination. The Virginian was a huge success and sold over 200,000 copies in its first year. The book is one of the top 50 best selling fictional works, has never been out of print, and has sold over 1.5 million copies.
The Virginian became a template for future Western literature with characters including the cowboy as hero, the innocent schoolteacher, hostile Native Americans, and devious villain. It is widely regarded as the first cowboy novel, though many modern scholars argue that this distinction belongs to Emma Ghent Curtis's The Administratrix, published over ten years earlier.
In 1904 Wister collaborated with Kirke La Shelle on a successful stage adaptation of The Virginian that featured Dustin Farnum in the title role. Farnum reprised the role ten years later in Cecil B. DeMille's film adaptation of the play. The Virginian was the basis for five Western movies and was turned into a popular television show in the 1960s.
In 1906, Wister published the novel Lady Baltimore which was named after the Lady Baltimore cake served to him in Charleston, South Carolina. Wister was said to have been so enamored with the cake that he used it as the namesake of his novel. The owners of the Lady Baltimore Tea Room in Charleston sent Wister a cake each year as thanks for popularizing the dessert.
Wister moved away from writing Westerns and his later work focused on biographies including ones on Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Washington.
Wister was a member of several literary societies, a member of the Franklin Inn Club, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University. He was an associate member of the Boone and Crockett Club and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society.

Personal life

In 1898, Wister married Mary Channing, his second cousin. The couple had six children. Mary died during childbirth in 1913. Their daughter, Mary Channing Wister, married artist Andrew Dasburg in 1933.
He built an estate in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, named Crowfield, and died there on July 21, 1938. He was interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Legacy

In 1958, Wister's daughter, Fenny Kemble Wister, published his letters and journals in .
In 1976, Wister was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
His diaries of life in Wyoming are kept at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Since 1978, the University of Wyoming Student Publications has published the literary and arts magazine Owen Wister Review. The magazine was published bi-annually until 1996 and became an annual publication in the spring of 1997.
In 1991, The Saddleman Award, given to the best book of the year by the Western Writers of America, was renamed the Owen Wister Award in his honor.
Mount Wister, just within the western boundary of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, is named for him.
Near a house that Wister built near La Mesa, California, but never occupied due to his wife's death, is a street called Wister Drive. In the same neighborhood are Virginian Lane and Molly Woods Avenue. All of those streets were named by Wister himself.
Wister was admitted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2010.

Novels

  • The New Swiss Family Robinson
  • The Dragon of Wantley: His Tale
  • '
  • The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
  • A Journey in Search of Christmas
  • '
  • Padre Ignacio: or, the Song of Temptation
  • ''Romney: And Other New Works about Philadelphia''

Non-fiction

Story collections

  • '
  • '
  • '
  • '
  • When West Was West
  • ''The West of Owen Wister: Selected Short Stories''

Short stories

  • "The New Swiss Family Robinson: A Tale for Children of All Ages", a parody of The Swiss Family Robinson ;
  • "Hank's Woman"
  • "How Lin McLean Went East"
  • "Em'ly"
  • "The Winning of the Biscuit-Shooter"
  • "Balaam and Pedro"
  • "The Promised Land"
  • "A Kinsman of Red Cloud"
  • "Little Big Horn Medicine"
  • "Specimen Jones"
  • "The Serenade at Siskiyou"
  • "The General's Bluff"
  • "Salvation Gap"
  • "Lin McLean's Honey-Moon"
  • "The Second Missouri Compromise"
  • "La Tinaja Bonita"
  • "A Pilgrim on the Gila"
  • "Where Fancy Was Bred"
  • "Separ's Vigilante"
  • "Grandmother Stark"
  • "Sharon's Choice"
  • "Destiny at Drybone"
  • "Twenty Minutes for Refreshments"
  • "Padre Ignazio"
  • "The Game and the Nation"
  • "Mother"
  • "Superstition Trail"
  • "In a State of Sin"
  • "The Vicious Circle"
  • "With Malice Aforethought"
  • "Stanwick's Business"
  • "The Jimmyjohn Boss"
  • "Napoleon Shave-Tail"
  • "Happy Teeth"
  • "Spit-Cat Creek"
  • "In the Back"
  • "How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee"
  • "Timberline"
  • "The Gift Horse"
  • "Extra Dry"
  • "Where It Was"
  • "The Drake Who Had Means of His Own"
  • "Safe in the Arms of Croesus"
  • "With the Coin of Her Life"
  • "The Honeymoonshiners"
  • "Bad Medicine"
  • "Captain Quid"
  • "Once Round the Clock"
  • "The Right Honorable, The Strawberries"
  • "Little Old Scaffold"
  • "Absalom of Moulting Pelican"
  • "Lone Fountain"
  • "Skip to My Loo"
  • "At the Sign of the Last Chance"

Essays

  • "Where Charity Begins"
  • "The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher"
  • "Concerning "Bad Men" The True "Bad Man" of the Frontier, and the Reasons for His Existence"
  • "Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard '80"
  • "The Open Air Education"
  • "After Four Years"
  • "High Speed English and American Railroad Flyers"
  • "The Keystone Crime: Pennsylvania's Graft-Cankered Capitol"
  • "According to a Passenger"
  • "How One Bomb Was Made"
  • "Roosevelt and the 1912 Disaster: A Friend Remembers - and Interprets"
  • "Roosevelt and the War: A Chapter of Memories"
  • "John Jay Chapman |John Jay Chapman"
  • "In Homage to Mark Twain"
  • "Old Yellowstone Days"

Poetry

  • "The Pale Cast of Thought"
  • "From Beyond the Sea"
  • "Autumn on Wind River"
  • "In Memoriam"
  • Done In The Open
  • "Serenade"
  • ''Indispensable Information for Infants: Or Easy Entrance to Education''

Operas

  • Dido and Aeneas 1892
  • Kenilworth
  • Listen to Binks
  • Montezuma
  • Villon
  • Watch Your Thirst: A Dry Opera in Three Acts 1923

Plays

Works inspired by ''The Virginian''