Owen Wister (1860-1938) was an American writer, trained as a lawyer at Harvard, who travelled to Wyoming for his health and returned with the material for a series of magazine sketches about cattle-country life. The Virginian, assembled from them in 1902, established the conventions of the western as a literary genre: the laconic cowboy hero, the eastern schoolteacher, the walk-down in the street. He also wrote biography, essays and a memoir of his friend Theodore Roosevelt.