Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Entry on Willa Cather, Janis P. Stout - The Writer At Work

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THE WRITER AT WORK

Willa Cather began to write and to think of herself as a writer at a relatively early age—at about eighteen, when her class essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal. She began her career as a journalist, or newspaperwoman, while she was still a student in college. During her college years she was also writing and publishing short stories. Even so, she did not publish her first novel until she was almost forty. It was in that same year that she first began to try to make her living solely by her writing. We could say, then, that despite her early start, she had a slow start.

In the fall of 1911 Cather took a long vacation from her job as Managing Editor of McClure's Magazine to spend some quiet time in upstate New York with her longtime friend Isabelle McClung, putting the finishing touches on her first completed novel, Alexander's Bridge (published in 1912). While there, she also wrote a...

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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