In 1904, the stage version of The Virginian appeared in New York after a very successful try-out in New Haven, Connecticut. The Times critic wrote that while “The Virginian is well worth seeing, both for its artistic and its popular interest,” it missed a chance to become a “great American drama” by remaining a “dramatized novel.” Despite this review and other lukewarm reviews, The Virginian enjoyed a four-month run on Broadway and toured successfully throughout the country for a decade. The legendary film director Cecil B. DeMille began his career by producing the first film version of The Virginian in 1914. Film versions also appeared in 1923, 1929 (one of the first “talkies,” starring Gary Cooper as the Virginian), and 1946. The novel also served as the basis for the NBC television series, The Virginian, which ran from September 19, 1962, to March 24, 1971.
After the amazing success of The Virginian, Wister left the West as the primary location for his fiction and turned south. In 1906, he published Lady Baltimore. It concerned the fate of the genteel “Old South” in Charleston and the threat posed by carpetbaggers. The novel generally was well-reviewed and sold well. Wister’s great friend, President Roosevelt, however, loathed the book for putting too favorable a light on the Southerners and too dark a shadow on the Northerners. Darwin Payne writes that Roosevelt “reacted so vehemently against Lady Baltimore that is it surprising the friendship survived.”
Following the success of Lady Baltimore, Wister lived largely as a celebrity. He gave many speeches at public events and similar activities. In 1906, Wister fell ill with another bout of something akin to neurasthenia; he was incapacitated for a year. After his illness, he gravitated into politics. He not only vigorously supported his good friend Theodore Roosevelt’s third party candidacy for the presidency in 1912, but he also ran as a reform candidate for the Philadelphia City Council. He lost and turned his hand to writing a third novel, one that would do for Philadelphia what The Virginian had done for the West and Lady Baltimore had done for the South. He had written some 48,000 words of Romney, when his beloved wife Mary died in 1913. This devastated Wister and ended any further significant work on the novel. He wrote in his journal in January 1914, he felt his life had “begun the final volume — And the thought is not unwelcome.”
Wister did not turn back to fiction until 1928. During the World War I period, he devoted himself to writing a set of three “political and moral polemics,” as James Butler terms them, on getting America involved in the war. These were 1915’s The Pentecost of Calamity, 1920’s A Straight Deal, and 1922’s Neighbors Henceforth. He was aggressively anti-German before, during, and after the war. When President Wilson did not take a course against the Germans in the early years of the war, Wister used his celebrity status to attack him. In early 1916, he published a sonnet to Wilson in which he says,“Dead Washington would wake and blast your soul.”
After the war, Wister’s writing production dwindled. In 1923, he published a satiric opera about Prohibition entitled Watch Your Thirst. He also returned to his Western material and published When West Was West in 1928. John L. Cobbs writes that “in each story, there is a moving portrait of fallen greatness. The greatness is that of the early West which Wister had seen and presented in his first fiction as a world of almost infinite potential and an essential moral and spiritual health.” Darwin Payne writes that it marks the end of the “real” West for Wister. Two stories in the volume are most noteworthy: “The Right Honorable, The Strawberries,” which was about an English lord exiled to America and his eventual decay and “At the Sign of the Last Chance,”where the inhabitants of a depopulated town come to realize that the town and their saloon have died, causing them to bury the saloon’s sign according to English custom.
In 1930, Wister published his last substantial creation, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. It was the third of three biographies that Wister wrote. The others were about George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. John Cobbs writes, “Taken together, the cast of characters [in Roosevelt] formed the rootstock of America’s ruling class at the beginning of the century.” The book is much more similar to the memoir genre than to traditional biographies.
Owen Wister died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, on July 21, 1938. His funeral was held at the Church of St. James the Less in Bryn Mawr, and he was buried in North Laurel Hill Cemetery. At his death, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, praised Wister’s “brilliant literary work, lofty standards, high enthusiasms, and nobility of character.”
According to the Official Website of the Town of Medicine Bow, in 1939, the towns people of Medicine Bow, Wyoming erected the Owen Wister Monument made of petrified wood as a “tribute to Owen Wister and his book that made our town famous.”
In May 1940, the Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art published an 1800 word excerpt of Wister’s Philadelphia novel. In 2001, James A. Butler published the complete surviving text of Romney (some 48,000 words) with The Pennsylvania State University Press.
The Owen Wister Award is given yearly by the Western Writers of America for lifetime contributions to the field of western literature.
Works:
Novels
Lin McLean. New York: A.L. Burt, 1897.The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. New York: Macmillan, 1902.Lady Baltimore. New York: Hurst, 1906.Romney and Other New Works About Philadelphia. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001.
Short Story Collections
Red Men and White. New York: Harper’s, 1895.The Jimmyjohn Boss. New York: Harper’s, 1900.Members of the Family. New York: Macmillan, 1911.When West Was West. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
Nonfiction
Ulysses S. Grant. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1901.The Pentecost of Calamity. New York: Macmillan, 1916.Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. New York: Macmillan, 1930.
Opera
Watch Your Thirst: A Dry Opera In Three Acts. New York: Macmillan, 1923.
Sources:
Brock, Henry Irving. “Brains and Blood in Recent Fiction.” New York Times (23 Aug. 1902): BR9.Butler, James A. “Introduction.” Romney and Other New Works About Philadelphia. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001. xxiii-li.Cobbs, John L. Owen Wister. Boston: Twayne, 1984.Davis, Robert Murray, ed. Owen Wister’s West: Selected Articles. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1987.Freeman, Castle, Jr. “Owen Wister: Brief Life of a Western Mythmaker, 1860–1938.” Harvard Magazine July-August 2002: 42.“A History of Owen Wister.” Town of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. 2005. 6 Jan. 2006. <http://www.medicinebow.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100:history-owen-wister&catid=56:origin-and-history&Itemid=66>. “Owen Wister, Western Writer.” CowboyPoetry.com. 2005. 6 January 2006. <http://www.cowboypoetry.com/wister.htm>.Payne, Darwin. Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1985.“The Spur Awards.” Western Writers of America. 2006. 4 Sept. 2006. <http://www.westernwriters.org/awards.htm>. “The Virginian. Owen Wister’s Stirring Novel of Western Life.” Rev. of The Virginian, by Owen Wister. New York Times (21 June 1902): BR10.“The Virginian TV Show — The Virginian Television Show.” TV.com. 28 Apr. 2005. 23 Apr. 2006. <http://www.tv.com/shows/the-virginian/>. White, G. Edward. The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968.Wister, Fanny Kemble, ed. Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.“Wister Services Held.” New York Times (24 July 1938): 29.“Wister’s ‘The Virginian.’” Rev. of The Virginian [stage play], by Owen Wister and Kirke LaShelle. New York Times (6 Jan. 1904): 2.