Lin McLean [Paperback]

Owen Wister (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

From the bestselling author of "The Virginian" comes "Lin McLean", his first novel, about a young cowboy from the Wind River country in Wyoming who tires of the dust and hard life and heads east to Boston to seek his fortune.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Forge; Reprint edition (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812580443
• ISBN-13: 978-0812580440
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,423,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inventing the cowboy hero . . ., October 8, 2007

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lin McLean (Paperback)

Western writer Dane Coolidge observed that a copy of "Lin McLean" could be found in almost any bunkhouse across the West in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its cowboy hero, an early version of Wister's Virginian, who came along just a few years later, has the same boyish charm and natural nobility. Though he comes from Eastern stock, he's a son of the plains, a man of homespun character, mostly unschooled, but both fiercely egalitarian and gentlemanly. An excellent horseman, good with a gun, handsome and gallant in his courtship of women, he is respected by all. Generous to a fault, he also takes under his wing a boy who has run away from a home that we'd describe today as thoroughly dysfunctional.

A series of short stories strung together into a novel, Wister's book is really a romance in a Western setting - the open range and frontier towns of Wyoming in the 1880s, an era already regarded as long past, just a decade later at the time of Wister's writing. There are no gunfights or outlaws. While the book is chiefly a portrayal of an admirable young man, its storyline has to do with the winning of a young woman's hand - two women, actually, each of whom betrays him, one for lack of principle and the other for principles too highly refined.

Altogether, the book is an enjoyable and entertaining read that, besides its occasional quaintness, is fully enjoyable more than 100 years after its writing. Wister has a gift for both humor and poignancy, and while the realities of cowboying, homesteading, and working with cattle hardly get a mention, his depiction of the Old West ranges easily from farce to sentiment to the starkly grim. McLean's visit to Denver at Christmas suggests something of Dickens' London, and the account of a funeral comes as close as anything to black humor. As a precursor to Wister's bestseller "The Virginian," this book raises many issues that get fuller treatment in the later novel. There are even glimpses of the Virginian himself, who gets brief walk-ons, with references to his own longstanding courtship of the schoolmarm from Vermont. With both men, Wister did more than anyone to invent the cowboy hero as he came to be known by everyone, from the bunkhouse to the parlor and eventually to the movie screen.