It is remarkable how many successful writers get into literature by accident. Very few novelists begin by taking up writing as a profession: most of them drift into it from other fields. Owen Wister was no exception to this. He settled down in Philadelphia to practise law; but the call of the pen was too strong for him. He was thirty-one years old before he began to write.
Owen Wister is a grandson of Frances Anne Kemble, better known as Fannie Kemble, the famous actress. He was born on July 14, 1860, in Philadelphia. When he was ten years old he was taken to Europe, where he remained three years. On his return to this country he entered St. Paul’s School, Concord, whence he went to Harvard, graduating in 1882. He took highest honors in music.
At Harvard he showed that he could write when he produced a libretto, “Dido and Æneas,” for one of the Hasty Pudding Club entertainments. When there he also edited one of the college papers, and in his junior year wrote a poem on Beethoven, which was published in the Atlantic Monthly.
With the intention of becoming a music critic Wister went abroad once more. He began the study of composition under Liszt in Paris. In 1883 he changed his plans and returned to America. His health was bad; so he went hunting in Wyoming and Arizona.
He found not only new strength, but a new world. The stirring atmosphere of the West woke in him a desire to write about it; but he did nothing at this time. He returned east and entered the Harvard Law School. He graduated in 1888, and a year later was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia.
But the West had great attraction for him. In the next ten years he made fifteen trips there. He soon saw that law was not his career.
In 1891 a series of studies and stories of the West by Wister started in Harper’s Magazine. These were later gathered together in a volume called “Red Men and White.” All the characters in these sketches were true to life; the Indian was the Indian of fact, and the cowboy was the cowboy of reality.
When Wister first began to write a fellow-townsman and critic of him said, “Owen Wister has written some creditable stories; but so, to be sure, have many others. His real strength lies in musical criticism.” This opinion hardly holds good today.
“The Virginian” is the best thing that Wister has done. It is absolutely realistic. This is a quality of all this author’s work, as is shown by an anecdote he himself tells:
“Once a cowpuncher listened patiently while I read him a manuscript. It concerned an event on an Indian reservation. ‘Was that the Crow reservation?’ he inquired at the finish. I told him that it was no real reservation and no real event; and his face expressed displeasure. ‘Why,’ he demanded, ‘do you waste your time writing what never happened, when you know so many things that did happen?’”