Owen Wister was not a very happy man. Yet his most famous novel, The Virginian, has a happy ending: the nomadic, bachelor cowboy known as the Virginian gets married to his sweetheart from Vermont, Molly. Wister wrote to his mother shortly after The Virginian appeared that the novel's “‘whole raison d'être’” was its “‘nationality.’” With this sense of national consequence, the novel is plot-driven to the altar of marriage. Regionally identified with New England and the South, Molly Stark and the Virginian marry out West in Wyoming, and their union caps, among other things, the novel's extended polemic about the state of democracy in the American Union.