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The Virginian (also sometimes titled as The Virginian, a horseman of the plains) was a pioneering Wild West novel by the American author Owen Wister, published in 1902. The book was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt a good friend of Owen Wister.
Ostensibly a love story, the novel really revolves around a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War in 1890's Wyoming. The real Johnson County War was a dispute between large ranchers and smaller operators over cattle theft. The novel takes the side of the large ranchers, and depicts the lynchings as frontier justice, meted out by the protagonist, who is a member of a natural aristocracy among men; this theme of the wilderness as a magnifying glass for humans' inherent qualities is also found in other fiction of the period, such as Tarzan of the Apes.
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