The Virginian

Owen Wister set the pattern for nearly every cowboy story that followed. On a Wyoming cattle ranch in the 1880s, a soft-spoken ranch hand known only as the Virginian faces down the treacherous Trampas, courts a schoolteacher newly arrived from Vermont, and is forced into choices that test his private code, including the hanging of a man he once called a friend. Published in 1902, the novel gave American fiction its strong, silent hero and the line, when you call me that, smile. Wister drew on his own travels through the West to render a frontier already vanishing. It remains the founding work of the Western as a serious literary form. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.