Owen Wister
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Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 – July 21, 1938) was an American writer of western novels. Owen Wister was born of old money in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a number of place names around Philadelphia can be traced back to the Wister family. He attended schools in Switzerland and Britain, and studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and Harvard University, where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon.
He worked as a bank clerk in New York, New York. He suffered poor health, spending much time in the western states of America. In 1885 he entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 1888. Wister practiced law in Philadelphia before devoting himself to writing. In 1898 he married Mary Channing, his cousin, and had six children.
It was Wister's Wild West writing that brought him to international attention. A fan of all things Western, he forged a friendship with 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt. To get away from Eastern life, Wister often went out West to Wyoming, still fairly wild in the 1880s and 1890s and was there when the famous Johnson County War took place in 1892). His most famous work is The Virginian, the loosely constructed story of a cowboy who is a natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War and taking the side of the large land owners.
Books and stories:
- Hank's Woman
- The Virginian
- Lady Baltimore
- Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship
External links and references
- [Article in Philadelphia Post-Gazette on Wister]
- [Books and Writers:] Owen Wister
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