ABSTRACT
Owen Wister came from an old Philadelphia family. The dominant influence in his early life was that of his grandmother Fanny Kemble, the actress and writer, whom no less discriminating a man than George Saintsbury called the most beautiful and wisest woman of her time. Wister who wrote this heroic and optimistic American tale, with its happy ending, was an inveterate pessimist, a melancholy Philadelphia gentleman, brooding endlessly about the inevitable decline of the American nation. Wister's The Virginian was an event in the history of American literature; but, even more, an event in the history of American imagination. As the judicious Wallace Stegner put it in his preface to the letters exchanged between Wister and Frederic Remington, Wister "acknowledged history in his novel by letting the Virginian take up land, marry, and settle down to the tamed routines of stock-farming.
