[2] Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860,[3] in Germantown, a neighborhood in the northwestern part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

[6] Wister briefly attended schools in Switzerland and Britain,[7] and later studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[8] where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals,[9] and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Alpha chapter).

As a senior Wister wrote the Hasty Pudding's then most successful show, Dido and Aeneas, whose proceeds aided in the construction of their theater.

[12] Wister had spent several summers in the American West, making his first trip to the Territory of Wyoming in 1885, planning to shoot big game, fish trout, meet the Indians, and spend nights in the wild.

On an 1893 visit to Yellowstone National Park, Wister met the western artist Frederic Remington, who remained a lifelong friend.

His most famous work remains the 1902 novel The Virginian, a complex mixture of persons, places and events dramatized from experience, word of mouth, and his own imagination – ultimately creating the archetypal cowboy, who is a natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War, and taking the side of the large landowners.

This is widely regarded as being the first cowboy novel, though many modern scholars argue that this distinction belongs to Emma Ghent Curtis's The Administratrix, published over ten years earlier.

[citation needed] In 1904 Wister collaborated with Kirke La Shelle on a successful stage adaptation of The Virginian that featured Dustin Farnum in the title role.

[22] Since 1978, University of Wyoming Student Publications has published the literary and arts magazine Owen Wister Review.

[citation needed] Mount Wister, just within the western boundary of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, is named for him.