Найти книгу: "The Virginian"

A strong, silent stranger rides into the lawless lands of the western frontier, battles horse thieves, deals with unyielding scoundrels, and wins the heart of a schoolmarm. Owen Wister's 1902 classic—the first great novel of the American West—is rich in moral drama and vernacular wit. His hero—like knights of old—lives by an enduring code of chivalry and is governed by quiet courage and a deep sense of honor.Set in the vast Wyoming territory, this masterpiece helped establish the code of the West and its stereotypical characters: the genteel but brave, white-hatted cowboy, the pretty spinster from back East, and villains beyond redemption. The novel is also on record for incorporating the first known «shootout» in American literature.Performed in theaters before it was made into several motion pictures and a television series, The Virginian was voted by the Western American Writers in 1977 as the greatest Western novel of all time. Brimming with action, romance, and atmosphere, it remains a classic of frontier fiction.

First published in 1902, Owen Wister’s “The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains” is a genre-defining work, arguably the first western novel, in which the life of the cowboy of the Old West is romanticized. A highly fictionalized account of the Johnson County War, a dispute in 1890s Wyoming between large cattle ranchers and smaller operators over land use, Wister’s novel is the story of a tall and handsome cowboy known only as the Virginian. At the outset of the novel we meet the Virginian through the words of an unnamed narrator at Medicine Bow, Wyoming, who is to be escorted over 260 miles to the cattle ranch of Judge Henry in Sunk Creek, Wyoming. Here we also meet the story’s relentless enemy, Trampas, who accuses the Virginian of cheating during a poker game. The Virginian is a man of honor bound by a chivalric code which prevents him from dispatching of his enemies in an underhanded manner despite numerous opportunities to do so. In this novel Wister evokes the untamed world of the American frontier brilliantly depicting its struggle to retain its romantic freedom against the civilizing forces of humanity. A sentimental longing for a simpler time, which characterizes our fascination with the western genre, will swell within the reader as he turns the pages of “The Virginian”. This edition includes an introduction by Struthers Burt.