The Virginian from America’s First Western Novel

A marvelous visual accompaniment to the influential Wild West novel, The Virginian.

This wonderful reference work offers a visual summary of The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, a 1902 novel authored by Owen Wister that was a landmark in 20th-century Wild West fiction. It presents the experiences of a transplanted ranch hand in Wyoming (The Virginian) who gained respect with the locals, fell in love with a local schoolteacher, and killed his mortal enemy in a duel. Numerous captioned vignettes present dramatic highlights from the book, transposed atop a basic outline map of the Upper West between Idaho and the Dakota Territory.

The sheet was cleverly illustrated by the talented Everett Henry. Published in Cleveland in 1960 by the Harris Offset Press. Just two years later, The Virginian TV series would air on NBC and ultimately run for nine seasons, highlighting the longevity and allure of the Wild West genre and Wister’s work. According to the Osher Map Library,

Harris-Intertype Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio, published a dozen pictorial maps for their calendars in the 1950s and early 1960s to advertise the firm’s high-quality color printing presses. Commercial artist Edward Everett Henry designed several “portrait maps,” all showing scenes from classic American and British novels. He mastered the difficult challenge of combining map and image.”

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