Editing Owen Wister (section)

== Legacy ==

Owen Wister died on July 21, 1938, his influence on American popular culture enduring through the Western genre he helped create. The conventions he established—the lone hero, the showdown, the civilizing woman—shaped films, television, and fiction throughout the twentieth century. His Philadelphia origins, his aristocratic background, and his eastern residence demonstrate that the mythic West could be created from eastern imagination as much as western experience. Wister represents what Philadelphia culture could produce when eastern sophistication engaged with frontier material, his legacy extending far beyond the literary circles his family had inhabited.<ref name="cobbs"/>