Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Entry on Willa Cather, Janis P. Stout - Reception Of Willa Cather's Works

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RECEPTION OF WILLA CATHER'S WORKS

As we have seen, Willa Cather did not fully devote herself to the writing of fiction until she was almost forty years old. Yet by the time she was fifty she had become recognized as a major literary figure and had received a Pulitzer Prize, one of the first to be awarded. A decade later she was being vilified by critics as a romanticizer and an escapist. Some dismissed her as old fashioned and fit only for the pages of women's magazines (as if that meant her work could not possibly be of any real value). Popular readers continued to enjoy her books, and one or two of her titles continued to hold a place on high school and college reading lists. But it was not until the 1980s that scholarly attention and recognition restored Cather to a place among America's greatest writers of the modernist period—and in fact, a writer in the modernist vein.

Her reception from the general reading public was warm throughout most of her...

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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