The Virginian

The Virginian (1902) is Owen Wister's classic popular romance, and a significant shaping influence on cowboy fiction. Its narrator, fresh from the East, encounters in Wyoming cattle country a beautiful, baffling, and sometimes violent land where the handsome figure of the Virginian battles Trampas for supremacy and demonstrates that the "customs of the country" must eventually prevail. In his courtship of the Vermont schoolteacher, Molly Wood, the Virginian encounters a battle of a different kind. Rich in vernacular wit and portraying a romanticized escape from the decorum of the patrician Eas…