In 1885 Owen Wister (1850～1938) recorded that 'it won't be a century before the West is simply the true America, with thought, type, and life of its own' and he wanted 'to be the hand that once, for all, chronicled and laid bare the virtues and the vices of this extraordinary phase of American social progress.' He never became that self-envisioned Tolstoi of the old West, but in 1902 The Virginian was published. It won instant success and skyrocketed its author to fame. It is still the most popular 'Western' novel ever published and the master design for the fiction of the Wild West. The Virginian established a literary form, a formula popularly known as 'horse opera', whose conventions, cliches, and values have reappeared in novels and short stories, in movies and television serials, ever since. The romantic cowboy is the hero and gentleman, one of those 'good men in the humbler walks of life', who sees through shams, defends justice and a lady's honor, shoots it out with the villain and conquers evil. Because of The Virginian, Wister created a character who is the original type for the Western folk hero. He represents the embodiment of certain American ideals--a man who is equal to all occasions, who shows independence of action, a man who keeps his word who is 'a broad-guage fellow living among narrow-guage folk'. But the literary device and cowboy code which Wister established dictated that the hero must kill the bad man. This necessity for sanctioning murder and romanticizing of the cowboy as a gentleman prohibited The Virginian and the genre it created from becoming serious fiction, or even an authentic product of the western experience. Instead of achieving his ambition, therefore, Wister gave us a sort of American folk epic, the cowboy story. Owen Wister believed ______.