"Starting in the late 1800s, the cowboy appeared as a recurring figure in short stories and pulp dime novels throughout the United States. The first true Western novel was Owen Wister's The Virginian [1902], whose eponymous hero was a cowboy living on a ranch in Wyoming. Though the Old West was not yet terribly old at that time, cowboys were already becoming romanticized in American popular culture. The success of Wister's novel paved the way for even more popular works by later Western writers"...