Owen Wister

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Owen Wister was born in Pennsylvania in 1860. His father, a wealthy physician, sent him to school in Switzerland and Britain for a short time. He graduated from Harvard in 1882. He returned to Europe to study music, but after a year, his father ordered him home to work in the banking industry.

Wister began writing short stories in 1891. In 1895 his first volume of short stories was published. Two years later, his first novel was published. Wister was fascinated with western culture and the lore of the west and spent several summers in Wyoming. His visit to Yellowstone in 1893 helped establish his natural inclination toward western fiction. 

He died of a stroke in 1938.

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Western Short Stories by Owen Wister

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Hank's Woman

Owen Wister

Many fish were still in the pool; and though luck seemed to have left me, still I stood at the end of the point, casting and casting my vain line, while the Virginian lay and watched. Noonday's extreme brightness had left the river and the plain in cooling shadow, but spread and glowed over the yet undimmed mountains. Westward, the Tetons lifted their peaks pale and keen as steel through the high, radiant air. Deep down between the blue gashes of their canons the sun sank long shafts of light, and the glazed laps of their snow-fields shone separate and white upon their lofty vastness, like handkerchiefs laid out to dry. Opposite, above the valley, rose that other range, the Continental Divide, not sharp, but long and ample. It was bare in some high places, and below these it stretched everywhere, high and low, in brown and yellow parks, or in purple miles of pine a world of serene undulations, a great sweet country of silence.

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The Promised Land

Owen Wister

Perhaps there were ten of them--these galloping dots were hard to count--down in the distant bottom across the river. Their swiftly moving dust hung with them close, thinning to a yellow veil when they halted short. They clustered a moment, then parted like beads, and went wide asunder on the plain. They veered singly over the level, merged in twos and threes, apparently racing, shrank together like elastic, and broke ranks again to swerve over the stretching waste. From this visioned pantomime presently came a sound, a tiny shot.

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