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9 - Willa Cather

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Timothy Parrish
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Summary

Willa Cather (1873–1947) is one of a handful of undeniably “classic” American authors. Where many of the most cherished American novelists are known primarily for having written one novel that is read again and again, Cather wrote several. The Prairie Trilogy of O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), along with A Lost Lady (1923), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) compose a list of works that would be the envy of virtually any other twentieth-century novelist. Among American novelists, only Henry James and William Faulkner can be said to have written a greater number of novels of enduring value than Cather. My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop stand beside The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Invisible Man (1952) as essential literary works that seem to ask and definitely answer the question of what it has meant to try to be American. Cather may be the most truly “national” writer in the American literary tradition, though as a literary artist her work was uncompromisingly original. Were we to imagine that all of American literature had been bound and contained within a single library and that by some terrible misfortune that library had been set ablaze, the survival of Cather’s works perhaps more than those of any other American writer would speak to future readers and allow them to imagine the challenges and disappointments faced by strangers come together from foreign lands to wrest from nature and each other a civilization that was itself the pursuit of an ideal. She was America’s elegist and, as a novelist, its epic poet.

Cather is known as the writer of Nebraska, a master of the native tongue that became the language of the American plains. Equally important, Cather was profoundly writing within the larger tradition of the novel of James and Hawthorne as well as Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Balzac.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

Acocella, Joan, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, New York, Vintage Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa, Not Under Forty, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Hoover, Sharon (ed.), Willa Cather Remembered, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Lee, Hermione, Willa Cather: Double Lives, New York, Random House, 1989.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Marilee, Willa Cather: Queering America, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, John J. (ed.), Critical Essays on Willa Cather, Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984.
O’Brien, Sharon, “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case against Willa Cather,” American Quarterly, 40.1 (1988): 110–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeter, James (ed.), Willa Cather and Her Critics, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1967.
Woodress, James, Willa Cather: A Literary Life, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Cather, , Early Novels and Stories, ed. Sharon O’Brien (New York, Library of America, 1987)Google Scholar
Spiller, Robert E., et al., eds, Literary History of the United States: History, 3rd ed. rev. (New YorkMacmillan, 1963)Google Scholar
McCarthy, Cormac, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (New York, Random House, 1985), p. 148Google Scholar

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  • Willa Cather
  • Edited by Timothy Parrish, Florida State University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139003780.010
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  • Willa Cather
  • Edited by Timothy Parrish, Florida State University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139003780.010
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Willa Cather
  • Edited by Timothy Parrish, Florida State University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139003780.010
Available formats
×