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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F WISTER | 31990001146898 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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."
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
I first read Owen Wister's The Virginian in 1950, when "big" westerns were returning to cinemas after the second world war. By this time it was a minor classic. Published in 1902, it had achieved astonishing sales in the US: 20,000 copies in its first month, 300,000 in its first year. By 1938, the year Wister died, the total had risen to 1.5m, and the book had been filmed three times. Wister's rich and beguiling story opened up for me the strange new territory of the west, exploring the feel of the cattle country of Wyoming when it was still largely unsettled. Its shoot-out climax became a much imitated model for the whole western genre. Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was, as Wister put it, "a colony as wild as Virginia one hundred years earlier". The narrator of The Virginian is a self-confessed "tenderfoot". In Medicine Bow, Wyoming - all 29 buildings of it - he sees the Virginian in a corral where he is showing his ranch hands how to catch a wise and tricksy pony. Later the visitor learns that the Virginian - as he is called throughout the book - is to conduct him to Judge Henry's ranch, 263 miles and four days' ride away. Wister had spent most of his summers from 1885 to 1898 in different parts of the west, though mainly in Wyoming. He loved the landscapes, the mountains, the hunting, and the camaraderie of the hard-working cowboys, so much so that he was anxious to communicate this new world to his homeland in the east. He pushed himself through an apprenticeship as a writer of stories, mainly for Harper's magazine. He also wrote a fiction, "How Lin McLean went East". By the time it was published and favourably reviewed in 1898, however, Wister had evolved a richer, more charismatic character who could carry a full-length novel, in the humorous and resourceful person of the Virginian himself The underlying theme of the novel - the difference between the settled east of America and the burgeoning west - is reflected in the Virginian's wooing of Molly Stark Wood, the schoolteacher at Bear Creek. Recruited out of her staid Vermont upbringing, Molly is horrified by frontier injustice and acts of violence such as the hanging of a cowboy for cattle rustling. Rereading The Virginian now, it is harder to accept the narrator's assertion that, when the Virginian returns to Molly after the duel, and she silently receives his embrace, "what they whispered then with their kisses, matters not." Wister portrays their attachment with insight and tenderness, but Molly's unquestioning acceptance of her future husband's dominance in a man's world, her decision to marry him after all she has thought and said, undermine her character and the novel with it. The author's daughter, Fanny Kemble Wister, called The Virginian "the prime romantic novel of the wild west". Today, aspects of that romance appear dated. If Wister's romanticisation of the west, and simplification of conflicts such as the range wars of the 1880s, mean that the novel has its limitations, Wister was still responsible for awakening a consciousness of the region in a vast number of readers who had never yet "gone west". Wister did not intend to create a documentary account of life in the west, which he knew was in a state of flux. But he did show how a dude could come to terms with it. "New Hampshire was full of fine young men in those days," says Molly's great aunt towards the end of the novel, when the couple visit her back east. "But nowadays most of them have gone away to make their fortunes in the west." After The Virginian , Wister wrote no more western novels, but he did continue with western stories. Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane , thought that short stories such as "The Right Honorable the Strawberries" and "At the Sign of the Last Chance" were Wister's best and most effective work, in the tradition of Bret Harte. To celebrate this centenary year of Owen Wister's novel, perhaps Oxford World's Classics (who published a new edition of The Virginian in 1998) might publish, if not "Lin McLean", then a selection of Wister's western tales? Caption: article-virginians.1 I first read [Owen Wister]'s The Virginian in 1950, when "big" westerns were returning to cinemas after the second world war. By this time it was a minor classic. Published in 1902, it had achieved astonishing sales in the US: 20,000 copies in its first month, 300,000 in its first year. By 1938, the year Wister died, the total had risen to 1.5m, and the book had been filmed three times. Wister's rich and beguiling story opened up for me the strange new territory of the west, exploring the feel of the cattle country of Wyoming when it was still largely unsettled. Its shoot-out climax became a much imitated model for the whole western genre. Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was, as Wister put it, "a colony as wild as Virginia one hundred years earlier". The narrator of The Virginian is a self-confessed "tenderfoot". In Medicine Bow, Wyoming - all 29 buildings of it - he sees the Virginian in a corral where he is showing his ranch hands how to catch a wise and tricksy pony. Later the visitor learns that the Virginian - as he is called throughout the book - is to conduct him to Judge Henry's ranch, 263 miles and four days' ride away. - John Bright-Holmes.
Library Journal Review
Considered by many to be the best Western novel, Wister's work essentially defined the genre, both in print and on film, and also created the archetypal Western hero: the strong silent type who rides in from the range and saves the day by shooting the bad guys full of holes. Like many in the genre, this also features a romantic subplot. This 100th-anniversary edition was produced in tandem with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and has color and black-and-white art by Western artist Thom Ross. A beauty. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.