Owen Wister was born into a wealthy family and spent part of his early education in Swiss and British boarding schools. He went to Harvard and spent time in a Paris conservatory, hoping to write operas. He eventually concluded this was not going to work, began working for a bank and going to Harvard Law School, after which he became a lawyer. That's a very upper class lifestyle. But Owen Wister is not famous for any of this, and he himself was rather bored with it. What he really liked was research the American West and writing stories about it. And today he is famous for a novel he published in 1902, drawing on and adapting some of those stories, that changed the shape of fiction for decades afterward. That novel is The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. It was a runaway bestseller, has never been out of print, and is one of the bestselling books of all time. Because of it, Owen Wister is the father of the Cowboy Western. A large market for imitators suddenly sprang up; this spilled over into other media, theater, and radio, and movies, and later television, so that many of the standard tropes of cowboy fiction in medium trace back to Wister's novel. At least five movie adaptations have been made, starting with a 1914 silent adaptation by Cecil B. DeMille, itself based on an already extremely successful stageplay adaptation.
Two of the movie adaptations are extremely famous -- the 1929 one with Gary Cooper and the 1946 one with Joel McRae. If I have the time, I might watch one of them to see how they adapt it. There are also several radio adaptations (including one by Lux Radio Theatre, which is usually good at movie adaptations) that I might listen to -- again, if I have time.
