Although best known for The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), a novel often credited--if inaccurately--with being "the first Western," Owen Wister was in talent and predilection perhaps more a short-story writer than a novelist. He produced over sixty short stories, some of which provided the beginnings for his novels Lin McLean (1898) and The Virginian. All but a few of Wister's stories were about the American West, and, appearing in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Cosmopolitan, they helped to transform the region into a subject respectable enough for "quality" slick magazine fiction.

Wister was the only child of Sarah Butler and Owen Jones Wister. According to the writer's daughter, Fanny Wister, her grandparents' household in Germantown, Pennsylvania, was "intensely intellectual" and their relationship "temperamental." From a family of prosperous merchants, the father was a practical and hardworking country doctor known for his...