Wister, Owen (1860-1938)

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Wister, Owen (1860-1938)

Owen Wister was one of a long line of lawyer-writers in American literary history. This Pennsylvania-born, Harvard-educated patrician became one of America's first and most prominent writers of the Western genre. Popular in his own time, Wister developed his reputation as a short story writer. He began to publish his Western stories in 1895 and was acclaimed by many, including Rudyard Kipling. In 1902 he wrote his most famous novel, one that is said by many to define the Western genre: The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. Loren D. Estleman wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that: "Most if not all of the staples associated with the western genre—fast-draw contests, the Arthurian code, and such immortal lines as "This town ain't big enough for both of us" and "When you call me that—smile!"—first appeared in this groundbreaking novel about one man's championship of justice in the wilderness. Wister's interpretation of the West as a place where few of the civilized concepts of social conduct apply separated his stories from the sensational accounts then popular."

Wister was the only child of Sarah Butler and Owen Jones Wister. His father was an intellectual, his mother the daughter of a 19th-century actress, Fanny Kemble. Her family had many literary and musical connections in Europe. Wister, known as "Dan" to friends and family, went to a private school near his home and then to Harvard. There he continued a literary bent shown in earlier years by writing for the college paper, the Crimson, and dabbling in light opera. Although his mother encouraged his musical talents, she never seemed happy with his writing work. A review of Wister's correspondence reveals that neither parent ever seemed fully pleased with this capable, well-rounded Harvard Phi Beta Kappa.

After his 1882 graduation, Wister studied music in Europe and his piano virtuosity was touted by no less than Franz Lizst. His father opposed the young man's love of music and pushed his own desire to see him established in a business career in Boston. Ever the obedient son, he returned to the United States. While the talented young Wister languished in his position at the Union Safe Deposit Vaults of Boston, he wrote a novel with a cousin but did not submit it for publication.

Although Wister formed many literary-minded friendships and enjoyed the men's clubs in Boston, his health began to deteriorate. Following the orders of his doctor, in 1885 Wister summered in Wyoming. The clean air revived his physical powers and ignited a love of the West that would guide his future career. It was on the frontier that he found his métier, both creatively and spiritually. Wister once wrote: "One must come to the West to realize what one may have most probably believed all one's life long—that it is a very much bigger place than the East and the future of America is just bubbling and seething in bare legs and pinafores here—I don't wonder a man never comes back (East) after he has been here a few years."

According to biographer Darwin Payne, "Wister's deep sense of the antithesis between the civilized East and the untamed West was constant." He did return East to study and then practice law, but ever after he regularly vacationed in the West. Law school gave Wister a chance to renew old Harvard friendships: he corresponded with Robert Louis Stevenson and became close friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes. But none of his letters from that period seem to indicate any real interest in law, even after he began his practice as member of the Pennsylvania bar in Philadelphia in 1890. The law seemed only something to do in between trips to the West.

In 1891, after an evening with friends lamenting that the American West was known in the East only through rough "dime" novels, Wister said that he regretted the lack of an American Rudyard Kipling to chronicle what he called "our sagebrush country." As they spoke Wister suddenly decided to take action himself and become that sage. He completed his first story that very night. Soon after he sent "How Lin McLean Went West" and "Hank's Woman" to Harper's magazine. "Hank's Woman" is the story of an Austrian servant girl who, fired in a visit to Yellowstone Park, marries a worthless man and is then driven to murder. The story of McLean describes a cowboy's return to Massachusetts, where his mean-spirited brother finds him an embarrassment. Both were published and found instant popular and critical acclaim.

These tales used the same style and formula that would characterize all of his Western works. The stories were based on anecdotes he had heard, used vernacular language in dialogue-based actual speech (which Wister painstakingly recorded in his own notebooks), and were full of descriptions of the West. Others had already written Western tales but it was Wister who defined the heroic, Arthurian character of the Western hero and gave him substance.

Wister's popularity and Western topics brought him into collaboration with Frederick Remington. The two worked together on a story for an 1895 issue of Harper's, about the evolution of the cow puncher. Their friendship and collaboration was a "natural," since many critics both past and present felt that Remington expressed in bronze and with paint the same feeling about the West that Wister evoked with words. Harvard chum Theodore Roosevelt labeled Wister an "American Kipling" and arranged for him to meet Kipling, then a Vermont resident, in the spring of 1895. Upon meeting Wister, Kipling blurted out, "I approve of you thoroughly!" His approbation was great balm for Wister, who suffered much of his life without the approval of his parents—despite the fact that he now had a national reputation.

Not long after his father's death in 1896, Wister began to date a second cousin, Mary Channing "Molly" Wister. A practical young woman, Molly had a career in education underway when they married on April 28, 1898, the same day the United States declared war on Spain. For their honeymoon the Wisters toured the United States, making a long visit to Charleston, South Carolina, where Wister's grandfather had signed the U.S. Constitution, and trekking to the state of Washington so that Molly could see her "Dan" in his beloved West. Molly was supportive of his writing and he supported her activities in education. Wister's writing flourished and their family grew—they had three boys and three girls.

Wister soon decided to write a longer work and he began to study the art of the novel. In 1902, Wister published The Virginian, with its nameless hero, his schoolteacher sweetheart Molly, and the villain, Trampas. Payne reports that the New York Times Saturday Review of Books, in its review of The Virginian claimed: "Owen Wister has come pretty near to writing the American Novel." Henry James wrote enthusiastically about the novel, which Wister had dedicated to his friend, Theodore Roosevelt. The Virginian was a financial, critical, and popular success. Wister himself turned it into play and it continued to be popular long after his death. According to Estleman, "If the importance of a work is evaluated by the number of people it reaches, The Virginian stands among the three or four important books this century has produced. By 1952, fifty years after its first publication, eighteen million copies had been sold, and it had been read by more Americans than any other book."

Four movies were made of the book during the century, in 1914 (with a screenplay by D. W. Griffith), 1923, 1929, and 1946. Of the four movie versions, the best known was the 1929 version starring Gary Cooper in the title role and directed by Victor Fleming. Cooper seemed best to capture the near-mythic nature of Wister's hero. The nameless Virginian is an American knight—a soft-spoken gentleman who is ready and able to survive and even tame the travails and splendid chaos of the West. Wister's novel defined our mythic Western hero as a quiet but volcanic strong man who plays by the rules. The story was also adapted for the small screen in a television series that ran from 1962 to 1966. The Virginian was thus one of the few stories that shaped Americans' understanding of the American West and of the place of individuals within it.

Most of his later fiction deals with the conflict between the good and the bad within the West. According to Jane Tompkins in West of Everything, his work is realistic in setting, situation, and characters—more so than rival fiction of the period—but still tending toward the sentimental and melodramatic. Wister tried to expand his writing style by writing his own "novel of manners," modeled on Flaubert's Madame Bovary but set in genteel Charleston, South Carolina. The novel, Lady Baltimore, was not critically acclaimed and had moderate sales in its time. In 1913, his wife died and he no longer wrote fiction. He began several projects and then took the path of political and non-fiction writing in the era just before World War I.

His major post-Virginian achievement was a biography of his old friend, Theodore Roosevelt, and many articles about his past acquaintances and friendships. At the end of his life Wister was no longer remembered as a great literary figure. He died on July 21, 1938, just seven days after his 78th birthday. His reputation was resuscitated late in the century by the Western Writers of America, which named a major award after Wister, and by an increasing number of scholars willing to take his work seriously.

—Joan Leotta