In what remains the only full-length biography of Owen Wister (1860-1938), Darwin Payne details the life of the man who created the popular image of the cowboy that dominated American culture from the early 1900s to the 1960s. Payne follows Wister from his privileged childhood in Philadelphia, to his undergraduate days at Harvard, to his musical studies in Europe, to his "discovery" of the West, and through his maturation as an individual and a writer. Payne draws on Wister's own voluminous papers and writings in delineating, for the first time, the real-life incident that prompted Wister to invent the character of "the Virginian," and in presenting the actual individual whom the famous character most closely resembles. Payne also provides intimate details about Wister's surprising friendships with such prominent American figures as Theodore Roosevelt, William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Frederic Remington, and John Jay Chapman.