Owen Wister

Owen Wister (1860–1938) was an American writer, the grandson of the actress Fanny Kemble. Born in Philadelphia, he studied music at Harvard and in Paris, where Liszt praised his compositions, then yielded to his father and took a law degree. A trip to Wyoming for his health in 1885 began a lifelong attachment to the West, and his stories of cowboys, collected in Red Men and White and Lin McLean, led to The Virginian in 1902, the novel that created the pattern of the Western. He also wrote Lady Baltimore, a novel of Charleston, a life of Grant and Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, about his Harvard classmate.