Owen Wister – författare

The Virginian (1902) is Owen Wister's classic popular romance, and the most significant shaping influence on cowboy fiction. Its narrator, fresh from the East, encounters in Wyoming cattle country a strange, seductive and often violent land where the handsome figure of the Virginian battles for supremacy with Trampas and other ne'er-do-wells. His courtship of the genteel Vermont schoolteacher, Molly Wood, is a humourously observed battle of the sexes, demonstrating that the 'customs of the country' must eventually prevail. Rich in vernacular wit and portraying a romanticized escape from the decorum of the patrician East, The Virginian exudes a sense of redemptive possibility, drawing on Wister's experience of a summer spent on a Wyoming ranch in 1895. This edition includes Wister's neglected essay, `The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher' (1895), a revealing companion to a novel that has disturbing undercurrents. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The novel that created the icon of the lonely, chivalrous american cowboy, the virginian is owen wister's well-written western adventure tale of the quiet,tough virginian cowboy, his tenderfoot friend, his schoolmarm bride, and their lives in the already dying frontier. UK YES

A ranch foreman becomes a hero in this classic Western novel that inspired five films and a popular TV series. Loosely based on the Johnson County War of 1892, a bloody clash between big landowners and small ranchers in Wyoming, Owen Wister's The Virginian is the classic saga of a man who embodied the spirit of a growing nation… “When you call me that, SMILE!” He wasn't looking for fame or glory. He wasn't looking for war. The man they called “the Virginian” was earning his way off the land, mingling his sweat and blood on the rich Montana soil as a trusted foreman for a rich man's ranch. Somewhere along the line he made an enemy, made a choice and then made a stand…. In the eyes of a woman, he was a man of contradictions, as violent as he could be tender. In the eyes of others, he became a hero, a man who had the courage to draw his gun and use it against his enemies—and the courage to stand for justice without it.

“Owen Wister has come pretty near to writing the American novel. It contains humor, pathos, poetic description, introspective thought, sentiment, and even tragedy.”—New York Times

Owen Wister is remembered today almost solely as the author of The Virginian, yet his short stories, dating from the turn of the century, gave us our first real knowledge of the West's "wide, wild farm and ranch community, spotted with remote towns, and veined with infrequent railroads." And this West was not merely that of the cowboy, but of the soldier, the seeker, the Indians, the hunter, even the priest. This volume presents six of Wister's finest stories, chosen to exhibit the less well remembered facets of his talent. Their settings—ranging from a mining camp in the Rockies to a northwestern territorial capital to a southwestern desert town, and from a California mission to army posts on the high plains—are as varied as the characters and the situations.The introduction by Robert L. Hough discusses the factors the impelled Wister to write about the West ad his ambivalent feelings about the region, as well as his story-telling techniques and artistic goals.

Dime novels had featured some rather scrawny horse-bound tenders of cattle, but not until 1902 did the cowboy become a fully realized article of American culture. That year Owen Wister, a native of Philadelphia, published the novel that established the conventions of the western. An immediate best seller, it has never faded from public consciousness. Suddenly there was the natural aristocrat, the Virginian, who faced down the archetypal villain. Trampas, flinging at him the unforgettable words "When you call me that, smile!" There was the eastern schoolteacher, Molly, far from being a wilted flower. They moved in the raw, bracing atmosphere that generations of readers and moviegoers would come to expect from westerns. To read The Virginian, again or for the first time, is to enter a cultural phenomenon. This Bison Book makes available once more the memorable 1929 edition that brought together the art of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. It adds an introduction by one of today's most brilliant creators of rugged individualists, Thomas McGuane. The author of Nobody's Angel (1982) and Keep the Change (1989), McGuane shows how The Virginian "bears all the advantages and disadvantages of being a precursor."