The Sculptor’s Funeral (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Willa Cather
- First Published: 1905
- Type of Plot: Satire
- Time of Work: The late nineteenth century
- Setting: Sand City, a small Kansas town
- Principal Characters: Harvey Merrick, Jim Laird, Philip Phelps, Henry Steavens, Annie Merrick
- Genres: Short fiction, Satire
- Subjects: Values, Art or artists, Death or dying, Small-town life, Materialism
- Locales: Kansas
The Story
Harvey Merrick, a distinguished sculptor, has died of tuberculosis at the age of forty. As the story opens, a group of townsfolk waits for the arrival of the night train that is bringing Merrick's body back from the East for burial in the small Kansas town where he grew up. The conversation among those waiting reveals the small-mindedness of their assessment of Merrick. When the train pulls in, Jim Laird, a local lawyer, drunk as usual but seemingly the only person who has a real purpose in being at the station, leads the group of waiting men to the express car. There...
[The entire page is 1440 words long]
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