Editing Owen Wister (section)

== Philadelphia Aristocracy ==

Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown, into one of Philadelphia's most accomplished families. His grandmother Fanny Kemble had been one of the nineteenth century's greatest actresses before her marriage brought her to the Philadelphia region. His mother Sarah Butler Wister was a writer and translator whose intellectual achievements complemented social position. His father Owen Jones Wister, a physician, provided professional distinction that the family's social standing enhanced. This environment—cultured, privileged, deeply rooted in Philadelphia society—shaped sensibilities that his Western work would transform rather than abandon.<ref name="cobbs">{{cite book |last=Cobbs |first=John L. |title=Owen Wister |year=1984 |publisher=Twayne Publishers |location=Boston}}</ref>

His education at private schools in Philadelphia and Switzerland, at Harvard College, and at Harvard Law School prepared him for conventional elite careers that his constitution rejected. His nervous condition, which physicians of the era attributed to various causes, led to his first trip to Wyoming in 1885—the experience that would redirect his life. The West's openness, its physical demands, and its distance from eastern constraints provided the restoration that his health required and the material that his writing would exploit.<ref name="payne"/>

His Philadelphia practice of law, following Harvard, proved unsatisfying despite the expectations his background created. His continuing returns to Wyoming, and his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt who shared his western enthusiasm, pointed toward the writing career that would eventually justify abandoning legal practice. The Philadelphia society from which he emerged provided the contrast that made Western values attractive—the formality, the constraints, the civilization that frontier conditions rendered irrelevant.<ref name="cobbs"/>