Owen Wister - The Virginian

After the war, Wister’s writing production dwindled. In 1923, he published a satiric opera about Prohibition entitled Watch Your Thirst . He also returned to his Western material and published When West Was West in 1928. John L. Cobbs writes that “in each story, there is a moving portrait of fallen greatness. The greatness is that of the early West which Wister had seen and presented in his first fiction as a world of almost infinite potential and an essential moral and spiritual health.” Darwin Payne writes that it marks the end of the “real” West for Wister. Two stories in the volume are most noteworthy: “The Right Honorable, The Strawberries,” which was about an English lord exiled to America and his eventual decay and “At the Sign of the Last Chance,”where the inhabitants of a depopulated town come to realize that the town and their saloon have died, causing them to bury the saloon’s sign according to English custom.

In 1930, Wister published his last substantial creation, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship . It was the third of three biographies that Wister wrote. The others were about George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. John Cobbs writes, “Taken together, the cast of characters [in Roosevelt ] formed the rootstock of America’s ruling class at the beginning of the century.” The book is much more similar to the memoir genre than to traditional biographies.

Owen Wister died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, on July 21, 1938. His funeral was held at the Church of St. James the Less in Bryn Mawr, and he was buried in North Laurel Hill Cemetery. At his death, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, praised Wister’s “brilliant literary work, lofty standards, high enthusiasms, and nobility of character.”

According to the Official Website of the Town of Medicine Bow, in 1939, the towns people of Medicine Bow, Wyoming erected the Owen Wister Monument made of petrified wood as a “tribute to Owen Wister and his book that made our town famous.”

In May 1940, the Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art published an 1800 word excerpt of Wister’s Philadelphia novel. In 2001, James A. Butler published the complete surviving text of Romney (some 48,000 words) with The Pennsylvania State University Press.

The Owen Wister Award is given yearly by the Western Writers of America for lifetime contributions to the field of western literature.

Works:

Novels

Lin McLean . New York: A.L. Burt, 1897. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains . New York: Macmillan, 1902. Lady Baltimore . New York: Hurst, 1906. Romney and Other New Works About Philadelphia . University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001.

Short Story Collections

Red Men and White . New York: Harper’s, 1895. The Jimmyjohn Boss . New York: Harper’s, 1900. Members of the Family . New York: Macmillan, 1911. When West Was West . New York: Macmillan, 1928.

Nonfiction

Ulysses S. Grant . Boston: Small, Maynard, 1901. The Pentecost of Calamity . New York: Macmillan, 1916. Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship . New York: Macmillan, 1930.

Opera

Watch Your Thirst: A Dry Opera In Three Acts . New York: Macmillan, 1923.

Sources:

Brock, Henry Irving. “Brains and Blood in Recent Fiction.” New York Times (23 Aug. 1902): BR9.Butler, James A. “Introduction.” Romney and Other New Works About Philadelphia . University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001. xxiii-li.Cobbs, John L. Owen Wister . Boston: Twayne, 1984.Davis, Robert Murray, ed. Owen Wister’s West: Selected Articles . Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1987.Freeman, Castle, Jr. “Owen Wister: Brief Life of a Western Mythmaker, 1860–1938.” Harvard Magazine July-August 2002: 42.“A History of Owen Wister.” Town of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. 2005. 6 Jan. 2006. . “Owen Wister, Western Writer.” CowboyPoetry.com. 2005. 6 January 2006. .Payne, Darwin. Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East . Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1985.“The Spur Awards.” Western Writers of America. 2006. 4 Sept. 2006. . “The Virginian. Owen Wister’s Stirring Novel of Western Life.” Rev. of The Virginian , by Owen Wister. New York Times (21 June 1902): BR10.“The Virginian TV Show — The Virginian Television Show.” TV.com . 28 Apr. 2005. 23 Apr. 2006. . White, G. Edward. The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister . New Haven: Yale UP, 1968.Wister, Fanny Kemble, ed. Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.“Wister Services Held.” New York Times (24 July 1938): 29.“Wister’s ‘The Virginian.’” Rev. of The Virginian [stage play], by Owen Wister and Kirke LaShelle. New York Times (6 Jan. 1904): 2.

This biography was prepared by Alan Jalowitz.