On October 24, 1908, Willa Cather sent two of her short stories to Sarah Orne Jewett. At the time, Cather was thirty-four years old. She had recently relocated to New York and had a successful career at McClure's magazine. Jewett was a popular New England writer, known for works such as Deephaven (1877) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Cather and Jewett had met for the first time earlier in 1908 through Jewett's longtime companion, Annie Fields, the widow of publisher James Fields (of the firm Ticknor and Fields). While Jewett sent a letter of praise back to Cather around Thanksgiving, she followed up with another reflection on Cather's situation two weeks later. In this letter, dated December 13, 1908, Jewett wrote once again to praise Cather’s talent—but also to encourage her to do more to nurture her gift s as a writer and not neglect them in favor of her editorial work. Jewett wrote, “Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.” For her part, Cather acknowledged in her reply, dated six days later on December 19, of the strain that her editorial work was putting on her creative mind. She compared her life to a circus balancing act, writing, “I live just about as much during the day as a trapeze performer does when he's on the bars—it's catch the right bar at the right minute, or into the net you go” (Selected Letters 118).

Despite the exhausting nature of attempting to balance both her editorial work at McClure's and her creative life, Cather still had her doubts. In her December 19 reply to Jewett, Cather confessed that her boss “Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories, that I am a good executive and I had better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed very oft en think that he is right” (Selected Letters 118).