Lin McLean (1898) NOVEL

American writer whose stories helped to establish the cowboy as an archetypical, individualist hero. Wister and his predecessor James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) created the basic Western myths and themes, which were later popularized by such writers as Zane Grey and Max Brand. But before Wister, Theodore Roosevelt published his book The Winning of the West (1889-1896) to make clear the meaning of the land beyond the Mississippi to the whole country, and Mark Twain and Bret Harte wrote their stories about frontiersmen. In art, Frederik Remington, born and raised in the East, and Charles M. Russell, who worked as a cowboy, contributed to the image of cowboy life. Although Westerns are normally set in the 19th-century, they are not considered simply historical novel, but special kind of moral tales, in which the protagonist, usually male, must defend his personal values of life in a violent confrontation with socially destructive forces.