The Virginian

The most well-known work by American author and historian Owen Wister The Virginian was first published in 1902. In the end he creates the prototypical cowboy who is a natural aristocrat set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War and takes the side of the large landowners. The novel is a complex mixture of people places and events dramatized from experience word of mouth and his own imagination. It is rife with idiomatic wit and moral drama. It is widely known that the book contains the first shootout in American fiction. It was chosen as the best western novel of all time in 1977 by Western American Writers. It is still a masterpiece of frontier literature bursting with action romance and atmosphere.