The scholarly edition of The Professor's House incorporates into its textual analysis findings from a recently discovered and significantly reworked draft of the novel. Willa Cather's perennial claims that there were no extant drafts make this discovery especially important to Cather scholars.

Written in 1925, when she was fifty-two years old, The Professor's House was Cather's seventh novel. Cather explained that in this novel she had attempted two structural experiments. The first experiment she took from the practice of early French and Spanish novelists of inserting a...

This collection of Willa Cather stories-her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career-is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes-all are amply represented here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtlety by a writer...

James Woodress goes beyond previous biographers in drawing on some fifteen hundred letters, interviews, speeches, and reminiscences. He separates much fact from fiction and takes into account the ever-growing body of Cather criticism. The author of My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop was in love with life: here are her passions, prejudices, and quirks of personality. Thoroughly grounded in Cather's writings, which were autobiographical to an uncommon degree, Willa Cather: A Literary Life is likely to stand as the definitive biography of her for years to come. James Woodress, a...