The following analysis of The Professor's House addresses an old critical debate over the relation of Willa Cather's art to her society's realities, to the actual world experienced by her readers. In the 1930s she quarreled with the critic Granville Hicks, who had liked her early prairie novels for their “authentic” and “realistic” pictures of the hardships of midwestern pioneer and immigrant life, but deplored the later works - particularly Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock - as glamorous pseudohistories, escapist fantasies to comfort “readers who share her unwillingness to face the harshness of our world.” Hicks understood Cather's escapism as a moral flaw and abdication of social responsibility; other readers have seen it as an aesthetic triumph. Cather herself, in a famous response to Hicks, acknowledged it proudly as a simple necessity: “What has art ever been but escape?”