Not the least remarkable feature of this collection is the range and variety of forms and subject matter--reviews (of books, plays, operas, concerts, art exhibits, lectures), feature stories, interviews, straight reportage, columns of miscellaneous comment, and travel letters. Seemingly, with no apparent effort Willa Cather could adjust her sights to any assignment and any audience. And if it is astonishing that she could write so much about so many matters at so many levels, it is perhaps even more astonishing that so much of it was so good. Undeniably, however, the chief interest to the...

Willa Cather's first published novel, set in Boston, London, and Paris, is the story of a man unable to resolve the contradictions in his own nature. The central figures are Bartley Alexander, a world-famous engineer; his wife; Winifred, a Boston society matron; and his former love, Hilda Burgoyne, a London actress. Long considered an uncharacteristic production, in the light of recent scholarship Alexander's Bridge is seen to be closely linked to the body of Cather's work, thematically as well as in its use of myth and symbol. Bernice Slote's introduction considers the circumstances of its...

The seven stories in this volume were written during the ascending and perhaps most triumphant years of Willa Cather's career, the period during which she published nine books, including My Antonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are, as Bernice Slote observes, bound by the geometrics of urban life--streets and offices, workers and firms, the business world of New York and Pittsburgh, the cities which by 1929 Willa Cather had known well for over thirty years." In her introduction, Slote discusses their biographical elements,...

As she grew older Willa Cather became ever more private, complaining of favor-seekers and other parasites of fame. But in her long career she granted thirty-four interviews, gave six public speeches, and published ten letters, discussing literature and the artistic life and illuminating her own life and writing. These fugitive pieces, here gathered for the first time, reveal the author's early thirst for fame and the reasons for her later renunciation of it. Included are Cather's radio speech accepting the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (awarded for One of Ours), accounts of her other...

For Willa Cather, "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts." The whole legacy of Western civilization stood on the far side of World War I, and in the spiritually impoverished present she looked back to that. To that she directed readers of these essays, declaring that anyone under forty years old would not be interested in them. But she was wrong: since its first publication in 1936, Not Under Forty has appealed to readers of all ages who share Cather's concern for excellence, for what endures, in literature and in life.

"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there-that, one might say, is created." This famous observation appears in Willa Cather on Writing, a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity, about her own fiction and that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Mansfield, among others. She concludes, "Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all-no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all...

Willa Cather was twenty-eight years old in the summer of 1902 when she saw England and France for the first time. Behind her stretched the Nebraska fields of her childhood and still ahead of her the world as it belongs only to great writers. The 1902 journey, coming ten years before she made her literary mark with O Pioneers , was unrepeatable, special in its effects on her artistic development. After disembarking at Liverpool, she toured the Shropshire country, got swallowed up by London, and then crossed the Channel to other skies--to Rouen, Paris, and the Riviera. These fourteen travel...

"Willa Cather is indisputably the author of The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. For readers and students today it presents an important profile of Cather's developing voice and a glimpse of subjects and styles that would be her special stock in trade. As the strange drama of Mrs. Eddy's life unfolds in the narrative we become aware of Willa Cather, the burgeoning novelist with a powerful and sympathetic interest in human psychology."--David Stouck This controversial biography of the founder of the Christian Science church was serialized in McClure's Magazine...

S. S. McClure was one of America's greatest editors and publishers in the lively era of muckraking reform. He is remembered for McClure's Magazine, which early in the twentieth century published the works of famous authors and social reformers. He was also the mentor of young Willa Cather. After leaving her position at McClure's in 1912, Cather ghosted this graceful portrait of her former boss. Cather's developing style is clear throughout The Autobiography of S. S. McClure. She goes far inside her subject to find his voice and catch the rhythms of his exciting life: his immigration from...

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...