It would not be an exaggeration to call The Virginian, by Owen Wister, from 1902, the most important work of Western fiction ever published.  It almost singehandedly made the Western novel respectable and almost singlehandedly created the modern myth of the cowboy as a kind of knight errant of the frontier.

The novel was part of a larger cultural movement in America which sought to understand the meaning of the frontier, and its conquest, in the life of nation.  In 1890, the U. S. Census Bureau had announced the end of the frontier — meaning that there were no longer large habitable areas of the country untouched by settlement.  An era in American history was coming to a close and the moment inspired a wave of nostalgia and reflection.  The crusade to preserve wilderness regions intensified and the colorful legends of frontier life started to become codified into mythic conventions.

Theodore Roosevelt’s memoirs of his various Western adventures, ranching and hunting, published in the decades preceding The Virginian, had contributed to his national reputation as a quintessential American figure.  The Western drawings and paintings of Frederic Remington (a friend of Wister’s who illustrated one of Roosevelt’s Western memoirs when it was serialized in a magazine) along with those of Charles Russell were widely reproduced.

It was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (above) that gave this cultural trend its most sensational dramatic and visual expression, which the movies would eventually appropriate and expand on, but it was Wister’s book which inaugurated the new literature associated with the trend, one very different from the lurid exaggerations of the 19th-Century dime-novel narratives.

The Virginian is surprisingly readable today.  It’s written in a breezy, genial style, and because it portrays a way of life in 19th-Century Wyoming that was already disappearing in 1902, its quaint Victorian mores seem more nostalgic than dated.  Its celebration of a simple, decent, gallant manhood informed Western literature and movies for generations — the book has been adapted for the screen six times (that’s Gary Cooper above in one of the adaptations) — and remains appealing in our own time.

Ernest Hemingway’s post-WWI investigation of manhood is vested with more doubt and angst than Wister’s, but owes something to it.  Hemingway loved popular Western fiction, and he and Wister were friends.  You might say that Hemingway tried to imagine Wister’s Virginian as a veteran of the wars of the 20th Century, wondering what might be left of him and his simple, gracious virility after passing through those epic soul-shattering catastrophes.

With, on the right, his third wife Martha Gelhorn.

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I attended a venerable New England prep-school (above) called St. Paul’s. It numbers among its graduates several famous people, among them John Kerry and Gary Trudeau, but the graduate I most admire, from the class of 1877, is Owen Wister:

Wister, who was from Philadelphia, went on to attended Harvard College, where he befriended Theodore Roosevelt, and like Roosevelt he traveled about on the Western frontier and became enamored of that region.  Also like Roosevelt, he became a friend of Frederic Remington, the Western artist.

In 1902, Wister wrote what is now considered the first classic cowboy novel, The Virginian — probably the most influential work of Western fiction ever published.  It introduced the line “When you call me that, SMILE” as well as a host of other Western scenes and themes and types that would become clichés in time.

It was enormously successful commercially, and remains readable today — an extremely entertaining work of popular fiction which helped fuel the craze for all things Western that gripped America around the turn of the last century.  It preceded by only a year The Great Train Robbery, the one-reel movie that almost singehandedly established the story film as a viable commercial form, helping to create the genre of the movie Western in the process.

St. Paul’s is not the sort of place you’d think of as a breeding ground for authors of Western fiction, but every century or so it produces one — like the author of Fourteen Western Stories, now available in a paperback as well as a Kindle edition.

. . . under the big Western sky.

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A new Amazon customer review of Fourteen Western Stories:

A terrific page turner, I enjoyed hitching a ride with these Characters moving west, with unexpected twists of plot and fate.

Sorry — I mean reading proof, for the forthcoming paperback edition of my book.  It’s sort of the same thing.

Meanwhile, a new customer review of the Kindle edition on Amazon:

Mr. Fonvielle’s characterizations in “Fourteen Western Stories” people a world that is uncannily life-like, yet they are drawn from the edges, the strange and fragile limits, of human experience, and they seem to hunger for an escape from shadow, for a return to times and days that, for them, seem to have never existed.

Characters drive these stories

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Sure, you’ve bought this as an e-book. You’ve probably sent a few copies out as gifts to your friends. But it’s just not the same as placing a real book version on your coffee table, to impress visitors, or reading a real book version in Starbucks, where it’s sure to start up conversations with attractive strangers.

Well, things are about to change — a hard copy version of the book will soon be available, thanks to the miracle of Amazon’s CreateSpace. If you can figure out how to format a text to the CreateSpace guidelines, and design a (somewhat) respectable cover on your own, Amazon will offer the book as a print-on-demand title, a real tome, with real pages you can flip through with your fingers!

It costs the author nothing but a little time (o. k., a lot of time), and will cost you only $6.99 — $6.99 to hold this amazing book in your hands, and show the world what kind of taste as a reader you have.

Most importantly, the standard trade-paperback size of 6 x 9 means it will fit in all standard saddlebags! Wherever you and your horse can go, this book can go!

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. . . Trav S. D. reviews my book Fourteen Western Stories:

Really enjoyable — Fonvielle’s prose is lean and spare, but laden with the occasional archaism or folk idiom that give it a ring of authenticity. Especially loved the dialogue, the characters are all faintly well-mannered in a way that is both characteristic of the west and the 19th century. Reminded me of Charles Portis. And the yarns themselves are all gripping, although some end kind of abruptly. Also a couple of the tales contain appalling incidents not for the easily shocked

If you don’t know know, Trav S. D. is the author of the best (and most entertaining) modern history of vaudeville — No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. If you have even the vaguest interest in the subject, you’ll enjoy it immensely.

Also on Goodreads Shelley Dell writes of the book:

story telling is an art. Lloyd Fonvielle tells a great story.

. . . and Bryan Castañeda gives it a five-star rating.

I’m very grateful to them all for taking the time to rate and review the book.

. . . of my book Fourteen Western Stories on Amazon:

stories from a real story teller

lots of variety here, All of the stories are told really well. more than worth the money, and well worth the time to read them.

. . . on Amazon of my collection Fourteen Western Stories:

Great story-telling

There is language well-used here, and humor, sex, bravery, honor, shame and surprise.

In an old form, stories of and in The West, there is a modern honest appreciation of men and women (what women!) and the trouble they get into when they meet and mingle. And the pleasure that can be found even in a rough and unforgiving world.

Fonvielle’s story-telling makes it hard to stop reading, true, but don’t hurry through these . . . stories. There are only so many and you should make them last.

Amazon offers something close to a million titles that can be bought for the Kindle. Each one has a sales rank, determined by a formula Amazon hasn’t disclosed, except that it’s a combination of total sales over time and the current rate of sales.

My book Fourteen Western Stories has cracked the #10,000 barrier in sales rank. It’s a long way from the top ten, or even the top one hundred, but it’s still startling. My novel Bloodbath, for example, published about a year ago, has a sales rank in the neighborhood of #260,000. Elmore Leonard’s collection of Western stories has a sales rank in the neighborhood of #50,000, although it’s been out for several years.

What’s more, my book has cracked the top one hundred in sales of short story collections, short story collections by single authors and Westerns for the Kindle.

I don’t know how this has happened. I only have three customer reviews, although they’re all positive, and I’m not doing any commercial advertising for the book.

These rankings fluctuate a lot, but somehow the book is finding readers, and I’m very grateful for that fact. I’m especially grateful to friends who’ve bought it and told other friends about it.