In 1920 Willa Cather collected eight of the stories she had written over the past twenty years into Youth and the Bright Medusa, stories of the perilous pursuit of the bright medusa of art in a hostile, materialistic world. These include some of her best tales: "Coming, Aphrodite " focuses on a dedicated painter and his affair with a singer in pursuit of celebrity; "Paul's Case" and "A Wagner Matinee" tell of a young man and an old woman with artistic longings crushed by their environments; "The Sculptor's Funeral" and "The Diamond Mine" show the high costs of success. The historical essay...

Willa Cather's twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather's Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery-conflicts in which Cather's family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is...

Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg. In creating Thea's character, Cather was inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, although Thea's early life also has much in common with Cather's own. Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her own way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea distills all her...

Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most important project of his career. With the onset of middle age, however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne. Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship torments his sense of...

Willa Cather s 1935 novel drew on her lifelong interest in music, which plays a transformative role in the lives of her characters. Cather s last novel set in the Great Plains tells the story of young Lucy Gayheart, who escapes life in small-town Haverford, Nebraska, in 1902 to pursue a career in music. In Chicago she falls in love with an older singer, Clement Sebastian, who finds renewed inspiration in her. However, tragic chance destroys their ensuing love affair. The novel has evoked divergent responses among critics and readers ever since its publication.
This Willa Cather Scholarly...