Owen Wister (1860–1938)

Owen Wister, best known for his classic western The Virginian, published this little Christmas western story in 1904. It’s a fun and charming story of a cowboy who arrives in Cheyanne, Wyoming after a long cattle drive at Christmas time in 1887. With his pockets full of a few month’s worth of pay, Lin McLean’s original plan was to get sauced during the holiday. Then he comes upon an old friend who invites him to go Christmas shopping with him. The Governor/Doctor has a long list of show more constituent’s and patient’s children he intends to buy for. As Lin follows his friend in the quest for gifts, he soon discovers the spirit of Christmas that has eluded him for most of his life.
A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF CHRISTMAS is a really nice choice for holiday reading, especially if you like stories from Victorian times set in the American West. The prose reminded me of Dickens, just not quite as long-winded. show less

Published in 1902 and widely regarded as the book that set the conventions of the western genre. It is well-written, in that unhurried way familiar to lovers of good Victorian literature. It is basically a romance, telling the story of the long courtship of a young, highly-educated schoolmistress just arrived from the east, by the titular character, the Virginian, a cowboy whose name we never find out.

So it's undoubtedly a romance, but it's much more than that. It's a character study of the show more character of the Virginian, and a love letter to the frontier, to the untamed and beautiful wilderness and the character of its people. The descriptions have the authority of an author that actually was there and saw the old west with his own eyes. There are lynchings and gunfights, but the are not really the point of the story.

Although the writing is good, it may seem strange that the narrative point of view changes. We start with third-person subjective, from the point of view of an eastern visitor that becomes a friend of the Virginian, and we discover that character and the western setting through his eyes. Later, the point of view becomes third person omniscient. Probably the reason for that is that the novel grew from several short stories that the author had written previously.

I found it quite enjoyable, and very readable more than a century after being written. show less

Great. It’s a western, before western was a genre. It has a “confirmed bachelor” narrator that meanders from first person to omniscient, and it reads a bit like Mark Twain and a bit like Jane Austen. The author touches on a lot of things, and includes enough coded hints about queerness to help a lonely reader feel seen, and I appreciate that effort. This is best book I’ve read in a bit, and the only recent read that I look forward to reading again some day. All the western genre show more cliches are here but it feels like maybe this was written before those cliches were deeply established. Old book, so there are gender and race issues—I think the author is self-aware about the world he describes and aims to achieve a hairline fracture in the roles and stereotypes of the era. Very quotable and philosophic. Genuine threats. Humanized villains. Wholesome, but not treacle…except the last chapter, which a modern author would have omitted entirely. Recommended for anyone who likes old books. show less

"… the romance of American adventure had drawn them all alike to this great playground of young men…" (pg. 51)

Heralded as one of the originators and codifiers of what we now call the 'Western', despite being a huge fan of the genre I did not expect to be moved greatly by Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian. And in its first act, it is a trial; wordy and indulgent and somewhat boorish, in the way that only turn-of-the-century writing can be. I found my eyes glazing over whole passages, show more many written in dialect. It is sentimental and the characters do not land easily. In the early stages it is hard to gauge what the book will be about.

But the impact of this novel on the popular image of the West is all but unparalleled, even if its title and author are not well known today, and if you are a fan of Westerns you read The Virginian and feel very much at home. (Those who are currently playing the Red Dead Redemption 2 video game might note the name of one of Wister's minor characters, a Mr. Le Moyne.) All the tropes which are now old-hat – the trail dust, the code of honour, the gunfight as resolution – came from books like Wister's, and when you read the Western's Genesis they become fresh again.

But The Virginian is not solely a museum piece; after a rocky start it becomes a fiercely engaging read in its own right. There are some great scenes and set-pieces (the resolving gun duel, for example, or the heartbreaking 'Balaam and Pedro' interlude), some spicy exchanges of dialogue, and some beautiful descriptive passages and turns-of-phrase. The book's sentimentality becomes more rugged (of the frankly-my-dear-I-don't-give-a-damn variety), in no small part because its dorky narrator takes a back seat, and the romanticism is, at times, irresistible.

When the book is assessed it often gets a kicking, not only because Westerns in general get a kicking nowadays, but because of a perceived racial and classist element. But I felt my Oxford World's Classics edition overegged this point; it is unreasonable to expect an enlightened 21st-century attitude from the book, and being conditioned by Robert Shulman's Introduction to expect some reactionary screed, I was surprised how tame The Virginian was on this front. It has its opinions, to be sure, but the editor of this contemporary volume is partisan; he does not let Wister breathe and, in his introduction and endnotes, tries to prejudice the reader against him. Whilst the Oxford edition succeeds in some respects, in its determination to direct the reader towards a specific appraisal it might be the worst curatorship of a classic I have yet read.

For Wister's The Virginian was not merely the first past the post for the Western saga. Its author was not really the creator of the Western tropes, but the observer and then articulator of what the West meant as an ideal. Wister did what any writer should do: he looked at what there was, found what was lying unspoken behind it and then brought that knowledge back, whilst entertaining his audience at the same time. He put his own biases into it – and sometimes clumsily – but considering what he achieves as artwork and frame he should be forgiven that. show less