Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 – July 21, 1938) was an American writer of western novels. Owen Wister was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician. His mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was the daughter of actress Fanny Kemble. He briefly attended schools in Switzerland and Britain, and later studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and Harvard University, where he was a classmate of both Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Remington, an editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Wister graduated Harvard in 1882.

At first he aspired to a career in music, and spent two years studying at a Paris conservatory. Thereafter, he worked briefly in a bank in New York before studying law, graduating from the Harvard Law School in 1888. Following this, he practiced with a Philadelphia firm, but was never truly interested in that career.

Wister had spent several summers out in the American West (making his first trip to Wyoming in 1854???), and was (like his friend TR) fascinated with the culture, lore and terrain of that region. When he started writing, he naturally inclined towards fiction set on the western frontier. Wister's most famous work remains the 1902 novel The Virginian, the loosely constructed story of a cowboy who is a natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War and taking the side of the large land owners. This is widely regarded as being the first American western novel: the granddaddy of the genre. The book is dedicated to Wister's good friend Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1898 Wister married Mary Channing, his cousin. The couple had six children.