The Virginian

The novel usually credited with inventing the western as a literary form. An unnamed Southern cowboy in 1880s Wyoming, a tenderfoot Eastern narrator, a schoolteacher from Vermont, a villain called Trampas, and a showdown in the street: almost every convention the genre spent the next century using is assembled here for the first time, including the line “When you call me that, smile.” Wister was a Philadelphia patrician and Harvard friend of Theodore Roosevelt, to whom the book is dedicated, and he went west for his health before he went west for material.

It should be read knowing what it argues, not just what it started. The Virginian participates in the lynching of cattle rustlers and the novel mounts an explicit defence of frontier vigilante justice as the true source of law where courts have failed — a passage modern criticism treats as the book’s central problem rather than a blemish. Its assumptions about who is fit to hold the West are of their period and are part of the text, not incidental to it. That combination is precisely why it matters as an ancestor document: the western’s politics were in the genre from the first novel.

Context: Listed under Western in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 830.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Owen Wister — the author.
• The Lonesome Gods and True Grit — the other two Westerns in the adult band; this is the book both inherit from.
• Frontier — Wyoming in the 1880s, written within a generation of the events.
• Ideological Family Tree — the portfolio idea: an ancestor text whose argument about vigilante law is still audible in descendants.
• The American Dream — the cowboy who rises by character alone is one of the form’s founding claims.
• Storytelling — the invention of a genre’s whole grammar in one book.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea.