Owen Wister

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Owen Wister, 1903

Owen Wister (born on 14. July 1860 in German Town ( Pennsylvania ), died on 21st July 1938 in Kingston ( Rhode Iceland )) was an American writer . He is one of the co-founders of the Wild West novel as a genre of American literature .

Life

Owen Wister was the son of Sarah and Owen Wister Sr., a patrician family from Philadelphia, and enjoyed a privileged childhood. His grandmother was the British stage actress Fanny Kemble . After school stays in Switzerland and England , he studied at the renowned St. Paul's School (New Hampshire) in Concord (New Hampshire) and later at Harvard University . There he began his writing career with articles for the student satirical magazine The Harvard Lampoon and met his long-time friend and later President of the USA, Theodore Roosevelt .

1882–1884 he spent two years in Paris . On his return he settled in New York, where he found employment in a bank. In 1885 he began a second degree at Harvard Law School. He received his license to practice medicine in 1888.

During this time Wister began to deal with the American West. This topic corresponded completely to the zeitgeist ; In the influential essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), the historian Frederick Jackson Turner transfigured the Frontier , i.e. the white settlement border in the west, as the birthplace of the American spirit and of the will to freedom and self-assertion that is supposedly peculiar to it. Roosevelt laid out in his work The Winning of the West (1889–96) the importance of western expansion for the good of the American nation. As the " civilization " of the West progressed, that is, the expulsion of the Native Americans, the settlement by whites, and the political organization of western territories in US states , Wister set out to transfigure this vanishing world and, with his first novel The Virginian (1902; German The Virginian , 1955), played a decisive role in the myth of the “ Wild West ” that emerged during this period .

The Virginian is the story of a lonely cowboy in Wyoming around 1880, who adheres to his personal code of honor despite the prevailing legal rules in the West and thus survives all kinds of hardships. If the novel was a long school read in the USA, by today's standards it appears more like a chauvinistic work with a decidedly reactionary tendency. In some other short stories, Wister took up the cowboy topic again, but also and above all devoted himself to other topics. With Lady Baltimore (1906) he wrote a nostalgic, glorified social novel about the better circles of the southern states. Wister also wrote some children's books . In 1897 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society , 1898 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and 1914 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1898 Wister married his cousin Mary Channing, with whom he had six children. She died in 1913.

Works (selection)

  • Hank's Woman
  • The Virginian (dt. The Virginians. Novel , 1955) (filmed in the television series The Virginian )
  • Lady Baltimore
  • Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship
  • Done In The Open (poems)

German editions of the shorter stories:

  • Novellas from the adventurous life of the wild west , Hamburg 1908
  • The Apache raid , Berlin and Leipzig 1912
  • The Tribulation Pentecost Fire , Lausanne 1916
  • The medicine man of the crow Indians. Based on real events , Bunte Jugendbücher (Booklet 123), Reutlingen 1927

literature

  • Darwin Payne: Owen Wister. Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East . Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas 1985, 377 pp. ISBN 0-87074-205-1
  • John L. Cobbs: Owen Wister . Twayne's United States Authors Series No. 475. Twayne, Boston 1984, 140 pp. ISBN 0-8057-7416-5
  • Stephanie Meyer zum Büschenfelde: Owen Wisters “The Virginian”: Effect and reception. A study of American national socialization at the turn of the century . Dissertation (University of Mainz) 1994/1995, 194 pp.
  • G. Edward White: The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience. The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister . American studies series. (Reprint of the dissertation at Yale University 1967.) University of Texas Press, Austin 1989, 238 p., ISBN 0-292-72065-3

Web links

Commons : Owen Wister  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Owen Wister. American Philosophical Society, accessed February 1, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Members: Owen Wister. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 4, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Wister, Owen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 14, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Germantown , Pennsylvania , USA
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1938
Place of death Kingston , Rhode Island , USA