Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Entry on Willa Cather, Janis P. Stout - Cather On Cather

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CATHER ON CATHER

Like many other writers (such as her contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter), Willa Cather was throughout her professional life an inveterate interpreter and reinterpreter of her own writings and career. She constructed herself as an aesthete and a bohemian, then rejected the label of bohemian, then built up her image as an active, capable newsperson and journalist, then (following the model of the man she called her “chief,” S. S. McClure) constructed herself as an editor and an impresario of high-quality commercial writing, then depicted her weariness as an artist distracted from her art by the demands of commercial journalism. And so on, throughout her life. She was always looking at herself in a mental mirror and was always conscious of being looked at and sized up by others. And she tried to control the varying ways in which both she herself and others directed their gaze.

To a great extent, Cather seems to have...

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1. Introduction
2. Essay: Introduction
3. Willa Cather, The Person
4. The Writer At Work
5. Cather's Works
6. Reception Of Willa Cather's Works
7. Cather As Studied
8. Cather On Cather
9. Bibliography
10. Copyright

1. Willa Cather