The Virginian

On the cattle ranges of 1880s Wyoming, a tall, soft-spoken Southern cowboy known only as the Virginian has become the most respected hand on Judge Henry’s ranch — lazy in manner, lethal in fact, and bound by a private code of honor stronger than any law. When a sullen, dishonest cow-puncher named Trampas insults him over a card game, the Virginian lays his pistol on the table and answers, “When you call me that, smile!” — six words that set in motion an enmity that will run the length of the book and end, as such things end on the frontier, in a walk-down in the dusty street.

Against this slow-burning quarrel Wister sets the novel’s tender center: the courtship of Molly Stark Wood, a proud schoolteacher from Vermont who has come west to teach and finds herself drawn, against all her New England training, to a man with no fortune and no name. Their long, sparring romance is also a negotiation between two Americas — Eastern cultivation and Western character — and it is tested to breaking by the West’s rough justice and by the reckoning the Virginian cannot, in the end, refuse.

Published in 1902 and dedicated to Owen Wister’s friend Theodore Roosevelt, The Virginian sold more than two hundred thousand copies in its first year and is widely regarded as the first true Western novel — the book that lifted the cowboy out of the dime novel and gave the whole genre its enduring conventions: the silent hero of honor, the schoolmarm from the East, the villain who must finally be faced, and the showdown in the empty street. Through a century of films and television, the world still pictures the West the way this novel taught it to.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, its code-of-the-West hero, and its honestly noted defense of frontier justice; a biographical note; a guide to further reading; and questions for reflection.