Owen Wister

The Virginian (1902) is Owen Wister's classic popular romance, and a significant shaping influence on cowboy fiction. Its narrator, fresh from the East, encounters in Wyoming cattle country a beautiful, baffling, and sometimes violent land where the handsome figure of the Virginian battles Trampas for supremacy and demonstrates that the "customs of the country" must eventually prevail. In his courtship of the Vermont schoolteacher, Molly Wood, the Virginian encounters a battle of a different kind. Rich in vernacular wit and portraying a romanticized escape from the decorum of the patrician East, The Virginian conveys a sense of redemptive possibility drawing on Wister's ranching, hunting, and fishing trips in Wyoming and Montana between 1885 and 1900. This edition includes Wister's neglected essay, "The Evolution of the Cow-puncher" (1895), a revealing companion to a novel that has disturbing undercurrents. - Back cover.

Virginian / Owen Wister ; read by Patrick Duffy (180 min.) -- Desert death song & Trap of gold / Louis L'Amour ; read by Stan Winiarski & John Malloy (180 mins.) -- Pistolero / by Bill Brooks ; read by Thomas Vorce (180 mins.) -- Frontier stories / Jack London ; read by Randall James Stanton (180 mins.)-- Old West / Jim Williams ; read by Alan Zimmerman (180 mins.).

When Sir Godfrey’s wine is gone, the terrible legend of the dragon of Wantley seeps back into his head. The beast had terrorized England’s countryside around the time of Elizabeth I, eating everything from trees to cattle, and now he remembered that his daughter, Elaine, is somehow connected….

The Stories Chosen for This Year's Anthology

"Owen Wister invented the Western novel with The Virginian, and that work and this collection of stories prove that, although many have gone after him, no one has ever topped him in skill and enduring appeal. Wister saw the story of the West as a collision of centuries, with the Stone Age, the Middle Ages, and the modern world coming together to form a new place and a new people. Wister said of this collection, "These stories are about Indians and soldiers and events west of the Missouri. They belong to the past ... but you will find some of those ancient surviving centuries in them if you take my view.""--BOOK JACKET.