While Wister’s novel was far from the first take on the frontier adventure story to appear in print, it’s become a classic for its themes of ranch life and the image of a determined yet controlled hero who is ultimately concerned with fairness and behaving like a gentleman.
These situations and characters, notably the remote Wyoming setting, sparked the imaginations of readers living in the “back east” that Wister described. Over time, he becomes a foreman on the ranch, falls in love with the local schoolteacher, and wrestles with the temptation to best his nemesis. Published in 1902, it tells the story of an unnamed narrator who arrives in Wyoming from “back east” and takes a job as a ranch hand. Many scholars of the genre consider The Virginian by Owen Wister to be the first “official” western novel. For readers fascinated with the expanding American west, the novels provided tales of adventure in a new setting, as well as a way to conceptualize a rapidly expanding nation. Like many popular genres, westerns first took off in the mid-1800s during the era of penny dreadfuls, which serialized a book over monthly publications. From the dime store paperbacks of the 1860s to the modern, LGBTQ+ takes on the genre today, westerns as a genre have come to symbolize a uniquely American take on the art of storytelling. The western is a genre with a long history of stories that hit at the heart of how Americans have envisioned themselves and their relationship to the West and the frontier.
This firmness has led to the idea that westerns are one thing and one story, at least by those not familiar with them. More than any other genre, the lines of what makes a book a western don’t seem to blend as effortlessly into different writing categories. For many, the hallmarks of the genre, with its focus on themes of adventure, justice, and the mythologizing of American culture, are the reason why they either love it or avoid it. Readers are either devoted consumers of the genre or never see themselves picking up a western book. Unlike other genres where, for example, fantasy elements might make their way into a science fiction story, readers tend to view westerns in more black and white terms. What, exactly, is a western novel? Westerns loom large in the literary imagination, whether the word conjures up images of cowboys and gunslingers, a dusty saloon, or what I like to call the “shirtless adventure men” category of romance novel covers.
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