The Virginian, Owen Wister
The Virginian, Owen Wister
2 Rating(s)
List: $15.00 | Sale: $10.50
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The Virginian

Author: Owen Wister

Narrator: Geoffrey Giuliano, The Ark

Unabridged: 14 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/20/2023


Synopsis

“When a man is kind to dumb animals, I always say he has got some good in him.”
“When you call me that, smile.”
“All America is divided into two classes - the quality and the equality. The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it.”
“But no earthly foot can step between a man and his destiny.”
Owen Wister
Ostensibly a love story, the novel really revolves around a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War in 1890's Wyoming ... The novel takes the side of the large ranchers, and depicts the lynchings as frontier justice, meted out by the protagonist, who is a member of a natural aristocracy among men. Owen Wister was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

About Owen Wister

The scion of a wealthy Germantown family, Owen Wister (1860-1938) showed promise as a musician early in his life, but his father directed him into a career in banking and then the law. Plagued with neurasthenia, Wister took a variant of the "rest cure" of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, traveling to Wyoming on Mitchell's advice. From these experiences, Wister began to write short stories about the West. His Western writing culminated in the 1902 publication of The Virginian, the most popular Western ever. In addition to novels, Wister wrote short stories, operas, plays, poetry, and nonfiction, including biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Henry on December 15, 2024

This novel The Virginian, the first real western book published in 1902, began the genre as a popular art form in America the wild cowboy and the schoolmarm, cattle rustling the lynchings, Indian attacks an explosive card game the deadly shoot out between the good guy and the villain in the streets......more

Goodreads review by J.G. Keely on October 12, 2007

I cannot believe that I sat in American Lit reading Hawthorne when I could have been reading this. If you have never heard of this book, then I am not sure why; just as I am not sure why I had never heard of it. It is surely Romantic, and sometimes Heroic, but there is a depth of emotion, wit, and t......more

Goodreads review by Charles on October 27, 2019

Review of free Kindle edition A Public Domain Book Publication date: May 12, 2012 Language: English ASIN: B0082RIL04 250 pages Considered to be the first real American western, The Virginian began an entire new genre of literature. A genre whose authors and readers are not limited to America. A fine novel......more

Goodreads review by Mike (the Paladin) on August 23, 2015

I have been meaning to get to this book for years, literally. It's one of the novels I'm sure my dad read and he wasn't really a reader, at least not when I knew him. I'm sure that some of you will like this book far better than I do. I think that it's an exceptionally well written novel. The prose i......more