Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East

In what remains the only full-length biography of Owen Wister (1860–1938), Darwin Payne details the life of the man who created the popular image of the cowboy that dominated American culture from the early 1900s to the 1960s. Payne follows Wister from his privileged childhood in Philadelphia, to his undergraduate days at Harvard, to his musical studies in Europe, to his “discovery” of the West, and through his maturation as an individual and a writer. Payne draws on Wister’s own voluminous …