Wister, Owen
Wister, Owen( 1860–1938),member of a distinguished Pennsylvania family and a grandson of Fanny Kemble, graduated from Harvard (1882), and found the subject matter for a literary career when ill health caused his doctor to advise him to follow the example of his classmate Theodore Roosevelt and go West. Out of summer trips to Wyoming ranches came the material for Red Men and White (1896), stories of the Western cattle country; Lin McLean (1898), another collection but more unified; The Jimmyjohn Boss (1900), a final collection of stories; and the extremely popular novel The Virginian (1902), about Wyoming cowpunchers during the 1870s and '80s, which established many of the patterns of fiction about the West and created a native mythology. His journals of his Western years, 1885–95, were published as Owen Wister Out West (1958), but he himself turned to other regions and subjects for the rest of his literary...
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