Willa Cather was a very prolific writer. Even aside from her novels, her known works include some five to six hundred newspaper and magazine articles, columns, and reviews and sixty-two short stories. Then there were the essays published in their own two volumes (with some repetitions) and the poems—thirty-seven of them in the original April Twilights and thirteen additional ones in later editions, which dropped some of the original poems. The bibliographic tracing of Cather's works from volume to volume, let alone all the variants caused by her revisions, is an effort of specialized scholars and a very difficult one.

This listing will give all her books (but not individual stories and poems) in the order published. Some stories that were never collected in a volume during her lifetime will be shown in the listing of a collection compiled later.

April Twilights (Richard G. Badger: The Gorham Press, 1903). Thirty-seven poems, some of which had previously been published in magazines. Thirteen were dropped and twelve added when a second edition was published by Knopf in 1923. In 1933 a new poem in memory of the Cather family hired girl, “Poor Marty,” was added. It is this grouping that is usually reprinted; the 1933 collection is used, for example, in the Library of America volume edited by Sharon O'Brien. Mostly short lyrics, the poems are predominantly classical in subject and in many cases are imitative of British poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936). Some, however, ring true with direct insights and scenes. Poems about the Midwest, conveying Cather's direct experience and employing an authentic-sounding language, include “Prairie Dawn,” “Prairie Spring” (which was used as an epigraph to O Pioneers!), “Macon Prairie (Nebraska),” and “Going Home (Burlington Route).” A medium-length poem of symbolic narrative called “A Silver Cup” is strikingly different from any of the others in the volume in its free blank-verse form and direct, pungent language. It has attracted little reading or commentary. One wonders what Cather would have done as a poet if she had continued in the mode seen in this poem.

The Troll Garden (McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905). Seven short stories, four original and three previous published. The most frequently reprinted have been “The Sculptor's Funeral” and “A Wagner Matinée,” both of them expressing a sense of the artistic deadness of frontier towns in the Midwest, and “Paul's Case,” expressing the dissatisfaction of an adolescent boy who yearns for a glamorous and perhaps artistic life. “Paul's Case” has sometimes been called Cather's best short story, but she did not think so herself. Readers and reviewers in the Midwest reacted angrily to “A Wagner Matinée,” with its depiction of a barren and slovenly home scene and a woman distraught at having to leave Boston's cultural opportunities to go back home to that deprived environment.

The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1909), shown as being authored by Georgine Milmine. First publication was in serial form in McClure's. Cather ghostwrote this hostile biography of the founder of Christian Science on assignment by S. S. McClure when Milmine, the original compiler of the material, proved unable to pull it together. McClure turned to male staffers at the magazine to try their hand with the material, but after the first number in the series appeared he was dissatisfied and assigned it to Cather. She spent months in Boston verifying Milmine's research and writing the subsequent chapters. It is a hostile book, depicting Mrs. Eddy as power-hungry and deceptive, and copies were systematically destroyed by members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. When it became rumored that the book was by Cather, contrary to Georgine Milmine's name on the title page, she replied angrily to queries, saying that she had done no more than edit the manuscript. But a letter to the Director of the New York Public Library admitted her authorship in terms that are more credible than her denials.

Alexander's Bridge (Houghton Mifflin, 1912). A novel about a bridge engineer whose last great bridge fails and falls into the water during construction. The catastrophe itself was modeled on the failure of the Quebec Bridge, which collapsed during construction in 1907. The novel was first published in installments in McClure's under the title “Alexander's Masquerade,” a reference to the hero's deceptive life after he enters into an affair with an actress. It is set mainly in upperclass Boston, where Bartley Alexander is a well-respected member of genteel society, and in London, where he encounters an actress he had known and loved before his marriage. Resuming his love for her, he begins to live a double life, while his cultured wife, waiting at home in Boston, maintains her faith in him. But he is consumed by guilt. In the final disaster, the (figurative) crack in his moral nature is paralleled by a great crack that opens up in the bridge while it is under construction. The bridge collapses, carrying many workmen and Alexander himself to their deaths. Both in setting and in technique it is imitative of Henry James and, as Cather later said, Edith Wharton, although brief sequences foretell Cather's distinctive work in subsequent novels.

Alexander's Bridge is not a bad novel, though it is seldom read. Clearly, however, with its drawing-room setting and its development of a plot based on love, sex, and melodramatic punishment, it is not characteristic of Cather's mature work. Though universally acknowledged as Cather's first novel, it was in fact only her first published novel, not the first she wrote. She had written a novel set in Pittsburgh before she moved to New York to join the staff of McClure's, but decided it was a failure and apparently destroyed it.

O Pioneers! (Houghton Mifflin, 1913). This is the first of Cather's novels set in Nebraska. It illustrates her willingness experiment with form—contrary to occasionally heard claims that she was never an experimentalist. The novel is a merger of two loosely related stories. Cather's term for it a “two-part pastoral,” points to both its traditional models and its departure from those models. The book also revises conventions of the Western by taking as its hero a female and a farmer, rather than a male and an adventurer. Alexandra (whose name, notably, is a feminine version of the name Alexander, used for the hero of Cather's first published novel) is the daughter of Swedish immigrants living in Nebraska. This, too, was innovative, since to that time Scandinavian immigrants had usually appeared in literature only as comic buffoons. When Alexandra's father dies, she takes over the running of the farm and despite complaints from the older two of her three brothers, not only makes a success of it but buys more land and becomes wealthy—prompting jealous growling from the brothers, who try to insist that the men in a family, not the women, are always the rightful owners of land. Meanwhile, in the second plot, Alexandra's youngest brother, Emil, grows up to be artistic, intelligent, and moody. He becomes involved with a young Bohemian woman who lives nearby, and the two are killed by her husband when he finds them in sexual embrace in the (somewhat Edenic) orchard. Alexandra is distraught, but opens her heart to the possibility of happiness when the sweetheart from her childhood, a man obviously of less energy and strength than she herself, returns to Nebraska to offer his consolation in marriage.

Cather called this novel the one in which she hit the home pasture. Unlike Alexander's Bridge, she said, in an essay called “My First Novels (There Were Two),” “Here, there was no arranging or ‘inventing,’ everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong. This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way …”

My Autobiography (Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1914), shown as being by S. S. McClure. For the second time, Cather was the ghost-writer of a book undertaken as a favor to McClure, who had been ousted from control of his own magazine by his partners and was facing financial ruin. She wrote it without accepting any pay as an act of gratitude, to try to help him financially. Her method was to listen to him talk about his life and then write the material up in sections soon after the interviews, in order to try to catch the pace and manner of his own voice. It was serialized in McClure's in 1913 before being published as a book, and attracted a sizable readership. Cather later said that her ability to write from a male perspective in My Ántonia was traceable to the practice she got by writing McClure's life story from his own perspective.

The Song of the Lark (Houghton Mifflin, 1915). A long novel in a heavily detailed style that Cather would not use again except in the first half of One of Ours, this book can be called a bildungsroman, a story of the growth and maturation of a person searching for identity and a mission in life, or a kunstlerroman, a story of the growth and development of an artist. Early sections are closely based on Cather's youth in Red Cloud, Nebraska, which is recognizable despite being called Moonstone, Colorado. The artist who is the central character, Thea Kronborg, is not a writer, however, but a singer. Like Alexandra, she is the daughter of Swedish immigrants.

The turning point of the novel comes when Thea (properly pronounced Tay-uh but usually Americanized to Thee-uh) withdraws from Chicago, where she is struggling to prepare for a musical career, and goes away for rest and renewal to a ranch in the mesas of Arizona. Cather had seen and admired this area in 1912 when she, too, left the city—in her case New York—and the rigors of her work and made a long visit to her brother Douglass, who was stationed in Winslow, Arizona, with the Santa Fe Railroad. There she rode horseback and hiked vigorously, and like Thea, found herself.

In addition to the autobiographical parallels, Thea Kronborg was also based on the famous operatic soprano Olive Fremstad, whom Cather knew. She observed and studied the rehearsal sessions of singers in preparation for writing the novel and had a music critic in Pittsburgh go over the text for accuracy when it was in proofs. At the end of the Panther Canyon (for the actual Walnut Canyon) sequence of the novel, Thea goes away to Mexico with a lover named Fred Ottenburg, whom she rejects after he reveals that he is already married—a sequence that scandalized many of Cather's original readers. After this point, she commits herself to the development of her art and her career, a process that is shown as being necessary for the fulfillment of the artist but inevitably hardening to her as an individual. She is strong, determined, and somewhat ruthless—hence, it might seem, somewhat masculinized. The fact that she eventually marries Fred Ottenburg is presented as something of an afterthought, and in fact is not always noticed by readers.

My Ántonia (Houghton Mifflin, 1918). The best known of Cather's novels, My Ántonia is set partly on the open prairie of southern Nebraska among Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrants (very much like the homestead where the Cathers first lived when they came from Virginia) and partly in a small town much like Red Cloud, but here called Black Hawk. It is worth noting that both Red Cloud and Black Hawk were names of important chiefs of Native American tribes. Cather was keenly aware that the town of Red Cloud had been built on land where the Sioux had their regular range only a few years before her family arrived.

Although the narrating character, Jim Burden, is a male, he strongly resembles the young Cather. A Bohemian—we would say Czech—hired girl Cather had known and liked, Annie Sadilek Pavelka, became the character Ántonia Shimerda (pronounced with the primary accent on the first syllable and a secondary accent on the -ni). When Ántonia is first seen, she is charming youngster fresh from Europe and eager to learn. She learns her first English from Jim, and the two become devoted companions. But her life leads her more and more into hard physical labor, while he goes away to college. When she has a baby by a railroad man who enticed her away with a promise of marriage and then deserted her, Jim is judgmental, even repelled. He does consent to see her briefly while her daughter is still only a baby and is surprised by her pride in the child. When he returns again many years later, he finds her married, the bountiful mother of many children, and living on a productive family farm, but severely aged in appearance. At the end of the novel he determines to keep coming back to enjoy taking a role as, in effect, one of her boys. One thing he seems to overlook is her determination that her daughters will have more options in life than she had herself.

The basic debate about My Ántonia is whether its narrative point of view, being told from Jim Burden's perspective, is transparent (that is, representative of Cather's own attitude toward her story) or unreliable (calling into question Jim views such as his minimizing of the hardships of Ántonia's adult life). Does she present farm life and the role of a nurturing wife and mother as a valid ideal, or does she show that such idealizing is engaged in by self-deceiving males?

The actual Pavelka farm, complete with the combination storm cellar/food storage cellar which Ántonia's children proudly display to Jim when he returns for his visit, is owned by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and can be visited.

Youth and the Bright Medusa (Knopf, 1920). A collection of eight short stories, four of them revised from publication in The Troll Garden and four new. Readers have usually found the most interesting of the four new stories to be “Coming, Aphrodite!,” another story of aspiring artists. It has a surprisingly erotic element, for Cather, in that the central male character enjoys spying on his female neighbor, an aspiring singer, when she is undressed. The collection as a whole is unified by a theme of art, artists, and the artistic life. Youth and the Bright Medusa enjoyed surprisingly strong sales for a volume of short stories, especially considering that half of the stories had previously been collected.

One of Ours (Knopf, 1922). Known as Cather's war novel and subjected to hostile criticism by male literary powers such as Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Wilson, the novel was begun in 1918 after Cather learned of the death of her cousin Grosvenor P. Cather at Cantigny, France, in the first major engagement fought by the American troops of the U. S. Expeditionary Force in World War I. In 1920 Cather went to France to locate Grosvenor's burial place and to gather first-hand impressions for her novel. She also did research for the novel by reading her cousin's letters to his mother, studying newspaper accounts of the war, interviewing returning soldiers in hospitals, and reading a diary kept by a physician in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, who served with the U.S. troops. The part of the novel that she based on the diary was a sequence involving an outbreak of the deadly flu epidemic on a transport ship on its way to France. The book was a best-seller, despite drawing a number of negative reviews, and it was for One of Ours that Cather received her Pulitzer Prize.

The first half of the novel is set in Nebraska on the farm of the hero, Claude Wheeler's, parents, where Claude is restless and dissatisfied. The family's life is shown to be rather brutish, with the family domineered over by the crude Mr. Wheeler and the entire place littered with ill-maintained machinery and gadgets bought by Claude's older brother. This home setting is reminiscent of the littered farm in “A Wagner Matinée,” and its detailed presentation resembles the fully-fleshed-out method of The Song of the Lark.

Claude longs to escape and to go to Europe. In college, before his father made him come home to run the farm, he had studied European history and had especially concentrated on the story of Joan of Arc, whom he interpreted in his senior paper utterly without irony as a saintly hero. When the U.S. enters the war (as actually occurred in April 1917) he quickly enlists, sensing that it will be the most significant experience of his life. Even after serving in the filthy, brutal trenches on the front he feels that the whole experience has been ennobling, and he is glad to have seen France—though we may question whether, in seeing that war-torn society and landscape, he really saw the Europe he so idealizes at all. Much as with My Ántonia, but perhaps even more so, readers have trouble deciding whether Cather shares the idealizing point of her hero or regards it with irony. It seems clear, however, that shares Claude's dislike of a certain kind of ill-educated religious leadership, which is the source of his wife's marrying him out of a sense of duty, without love.

A Lost Lady (Knopf, 1923). Another popular success but this time also a success with reviewers and critics, this short novel with a fictionalized Nebraska setting was modeled on the character and decline of a beautiful, charming woman Cather had known and admired in Red Cloud, Lyra Garber. Mrs. Garber, known for her parties and picnics, was married to the much older Cyrus Garber, a banker and former railroad developer who had served as governor of Nebraska. She appears as the charming Marian Forrester in the novel. The late-nineteenth-century time setting of the novel is very important, encompassing as it does the town's transition from the status of a frontier settlement to a town struggling for prosperity and amenities through business deals.

Cather seems to idealize frontier railroad-builders but provides enough glimpses of an alternative perspective to lead readers to question the idealized version. Marian Forrester, the “lost lady” of the title, may be lost morally (since she has affairs and allows her unscrupulous young attorney to take sexual liberties with her and to invest her money in shady ways after Mr. Forrester's death) or simply lost in time, or it may be only in the misguided views of small-town gossips, such as the male narrator, Niel Herbert, that she is lost at all. Once again, readers are hard pressed to know whether the narrative voice is ironic.

Some informed readers consider A Lost Lady Cather's greatest masterpiece.

The Professor's House (Knopf, 1925). Another novel in experimental form. This time Cather breaks the book into three parts, inserting a contrasting story, told in a different narrative voice, into the middle. The first and third parts, told from third-person point of view, are about an aging and somewhat cynical professor of history who at the time the book opens has written eight books (like Cather, if we don't count her ghost-written books or her book of poetry) and won a prize, but feels burned out and discouraged. Even though St. Peter is a male, he can be seen as a representation of Cather herself in middle age, no longer so lively and optimistic as she had been a few years before.

The middle part of the novel is a charming but finally ambiguous adventure story told from first-person point of view by a very young man, Tom Outland, who became one of the professor's students before going away to World War I and being killed. Once again Cather's imagination was circling around the devastating historic event of the war. She called the middle section, which takes place on and around a western setting called Blue Mesa, a window opened to provide glimpses of the outdoors from a stuffy room, and a stuffy room is indeed important in a crucial part of the action. The professor spends most of his time in a stuffy attic where he has his study and where, near the end of the novel, he almost dies from suffocation. He is overcome by leaking gas in the unventilated attic room because the window, significantly, has fallen shut. His housekeeper saves him when she hears him fall to the floor and rushes in to open the window—a highly symbolic action.

In the middle section, the young Tom Outland discovers the long-abandoned cliff dwellings of Anasazi people (ancient Native Americans) who have long ago disappeared. The discovery follows very closely the discovery of Mesa Verde, in Colorado. When Tom's partner in the discovery betrays him—so Tom believes—by selling relics from the site to a German collector, Tom denounces him and goes off to become a college student. That is, of course, where his life intersects that of the main character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter. Years later, when the novel opens, the professor feels detached from his family, his work, and his sense of himself. The only vibrant, joyful memory he retains in his later years is his memory of Tom Outland. But at the end, after his brush with death, he discovers a rather subdued will to live, expecting no more joy in life but perhaps some satisfaction in his sharing of human commonality.

My Mortal Enemy (Knopf, 1926). A very short, bare-bones novel of industrial decline and economic displacement in early twentieth-century United States. So brief some readers complained of false advertising when Knopf announced it as a novel, it is an extreme version of what Cather called “the novel démeublé,” or the unfurnished novel—that is, the novel stripped of any unnecessary adornments. The central character, Nellie Birdseye, fixes her bird's-eye view on an older couple famous in her home town for having romantically eloped. What Nellie sees during a Christmas-time visit to them in New York City, years after their elopement, is that the romance has gone out of their marriage. Mr. Henshawe seems to have an eye for other women, and his wife, Myra, frets over having less money than their acquaintances. After Mr. Henshawe loses his job in a corporate restructuring (what we would call a rif, or reduction in force), they are left not only poor but estranged and, in the case of the wife, embittered. The ending, where the dying Myra Henshawe laments being left alone with her mortal enemy, has sometimes puzzled readers, who have variously conjectured that the “mortal enemy” was herself or Nellie or poverty itself or the nolonger-loved husband. Cather insisted that there was only one right reading. Her correspondence, which identifies certain of the novel's reviewers as having succeeded in reading the book correctly, makes it clear that she intended the “mortal enemy” as the husband, and the point of the book as the ironic intertwining of extreme love with hate.

The glimpses of New York in the early part of the book are charming and lively. They remind us that Cather lived in New York for most of her adult life and knew the city well.

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Knopf, 1927). On trips to New Mexico over several years, Cather immersed herself in the landscape and traditions of the Southwest, and through her extensive reading, especially in church history, she immersed herself in the area's past. The result was this novel that, like its predecessor, people have often thought was not a novel at all. Cather herself called it simply a narrative, something on the order of a legend. She also compared it to visual arts—both to the Hans Holbein woodcut referred to in the title and to the stylized, neo-Classical murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose work did not pretend to be either realistic or modern in style. (A mural by Puvis de Chavannes that Cather knew well can be seen at the Boston Public Library.)

In an episodic narrative, Cather follows the career of the French priest Jean Marie Latour, closely modeled on Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), the actual first bishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and later Archbishop. Latour comes to America as Vicar Apostolic when the region we call the Southwest has just been taken over by the United States from Mexico. He is ultimately elevated to the status of archbishop and finds the fullest meaning of his life in the construction of a cathedral in Santa Fe. In the last scene of the novel, his body lies in state in his cathedral. The actual cathedral, with the statue of Archbishop Lamy standing in front, can be visited in Santa Fe.

In parallel to the story of her archbishop, Cather follows the history of New Mexico, beginning with its seizure under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican War. The historic specificity of the story is established in an entirely fictional introductory scene overlooking Rome, where Latour is discussed by church officials keenly aware of the treaty. At the end, the book raises the ironic idea that this civilizing representative of colonialism, the archbishop, enjoyed the place more when it was as he found it, fresh and uncluttered. Cather does not belabor the point (we would not expect her to), and she very clearly does both revere and celebrate Father Latour as a great hero; thus her attitude toward the historic process she chronicles is left very ambiguous.

One of the main issues in the novel is the tension between a newly imposed version of Catholicism and a long-established local Catholic tradition with its own practices. Latour brings in French and Spanish priests to replace the native (Mexican) priests he found there when he arrived. He also attempts to suppress the practices of the Penitentes, a religious brotherhood still in existence today whose secret devotionals during the Easter season were often bloody. At every turn, he proves himself an outsider—even, one might say, a self-deceived tool of imperialist colonialism. But it is never clear that Cather intends that meaning.

It should be noted that besides Lamy and his fellow priest, Joseph P. Machebeuf, who appear under the names Latour and Vaillant, other actual historic persons appear in the novel under their own names, including Padre Antonio José Martínez and Kit Carson. Many New Mexicans still revile Cather's hostile depiction of Martínez, who was one of the native priests Latour (and the actual Lamy) worked to vilify and displace.

The book has little sense of plot. It reads more like a series of static pictures whose sequence depicts the slow movement of a collective and rather impersonal destiny.

Obscure Destinies (Knopf, 1932). This collection of three substantial short stories—“Neighbour Rosicky,” “Old Mrs. Harris,” and “Two Friends”—is often thought to contain some of Cather's very best work. All three stories show a return to her earlier interest in common people and rural life in the area where she grew up. “Old Mrs. Harris,” with its three generations of women, the youngest of whom is intent on breaking free by going to college, is pointedly autobiographical. “Neighbour Rosicky” returns to Cather's interest in the immigrant people among whom she lived when her family migrated to Nebraska from Virginia, but explores the feelings of the second generation. “Two Friends” recalls the friendship and political debates of two businessmen in Red Cloud when she was growing up. Cather worried that her longtime friend Carrie Miner Sherwood, who had remained in Red Cloud, would be offended when she recognized her father in the character called Mr. Dillon.

Shadows on the Rock (Knopf, 1933). Cather began this novel of seventeenth-century Quebec in 1928 after rereading the famous history of the area by Francis Parkman, Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, during a visit to the city. She also began reading, while there, other histories which she found in the hotel library, and she met a well-known church historian, Abbé Henri Scott. Having enjoyed the writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop so much that she admitted to feeling depressed after it was finished, she gladly returned to the subject of French religion and culture in America, and she continued her reading in the history of the place and time during her work on the novel. Her writing was interrupted, however, by a series of family problems, mainly the death of her father and the long last illness of her mother.

At one level, Shadows on the Rock is a celebration of home virtues and the daily realities of ordinary domestic life; at another, it celebrates the life of religious chastity lived by nuns and priests. Thus, like Death Comes for the Archbishop, it is rather quiet. It follows the life of a little girl growing up in Quebec whose father always means to return home to France, while she, despite being thoroughly obedient and submissive in other respects, insists that she is a Canadian. They remain in Quebec.

The novel drew negative comments at the time of its publication for its supposed evasion of current social problems—after all, it looked back three centuries for its milieu—and for its lack of action or excitement. Nevertheless, it proved very popular with readers, perhaps, in part, because it showed the ingenuity shown by its heroine in making daily life comfortable in spite of deprivations, due to Quebec's isolation. Because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, many Americans were also being challenged at that time to exert ingenuity in finding ways to get by. The book was greatly praised in the Catholic press, and many readers incorrectly believed Cather herself had converted to Catholicism. When asked about her supposed conversion, she stated that she was an admirer of Catholicism and its rituals, but she remained a member of the Episcopal Church in Red Cloud.

Lucy Gayheart (Knopf, 1935). This medium-length novel about a young girl who aspires to be an artist but (unlike Thea Kronborg of The Song of the Lark) lacks discipline and commitment, has never been considered one of Cather's best. It is set in Nebraska and in Chicago, where Lucy, like Thea, goes to study music. Cather had gone to Chicago for her first experience of big-city opera when she was a senior at the University of Nebraska. Lucy falls under the influence of the baritone for whom she works as practice accompanist, to the point that she tells her suitor from home that she has “gone all the way” with him. She means the phrase as a reference to her mental devotion to him and the artistic discipline he exemplifies, but she is rather dishonest in using the phrase, because she realizes that her suitor will believe she has become the singer's mistress. As expected, he disavows all further dealings with her. When she comes home for a Christmas visit, he refuses to give her a ride in his sleigh when she is caught out in freezing weather. Angrily, she trudges on through the cold, persisting in her intention of going ice skating on the frozen Platte River (a major actual river in Nebraska). But because of her anger she fails to notice that the ice is weak, and she drowns when it breaks under her. She is remembered years afterward by those who had known her as a vivid, cheerful presence in the rather gray town. It is a typical Cather ending, a retrospective view after a break in the text.

Like many other works by Cather, Lucy Gayheart was built out of her memories of Red Cloud, including a specific girl she had known who was a good skater.

Not under Forty (Knopf, 1936). By this time in her life Cather had become disaffected from the course of contemporary life. In her introduction to this collection of essays she proclaimed her withdrawal by insisting that readers could understand her meaning only if they were not under forty years of age. It was not an attitude calculated to win friendly readers—or critics. The essays in this collection that are usually regarded as most important are “A Chance Meeting,” because of its contribution to the later short story “An Old Beauty,” and “The Novel Démeuble,” a statement of Cather's principles of compression and uncluttering of main motifs.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Knopf, 1940). Once again Cather turned to the past, though not to such a distant past as in Shadows on the Rock. In this novel begun in 1937, she drew on childhood memories and family traditions for a story set in pre-Civil War Virginia. The central action in the book is that of Rachel Blake, the abolitionist daughter of the wealthy slave owner Sapphira, who in defiance of her powerful mother helps the slave girl Nancy escape to the North. Rachel Blake was modeled on Cather's maternal grandmother, Rachel Boak, who did help a female slave escape. The theme of the novel involves the ambiguous combination of social charm with a great social evil, since Virginian civilization is shown as being both quite lovely in some ways but at the same time utterly corrupted by being constructed on the injustice of slavery. The novel also involves a reconciliation of mother and daughter—a theme that must have been greatly on Cather's mind over the years, as she was often at odds with her own willful mother, who believed in traditional domestic lives for women.

Cather said that she threw away six pounds of paper with extraneous details about Virginia and its customs in order to produce an artful novel out of her material.

POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

The Old Beauty and Others (Knopf, 1948). Like Obscure Destinies, this volume contains three long stories—“The Old Beauty,” written in 1937, and “The Best Years” and “Before Breakfast,” both written in 1944 and 1945. The three stories, none of them published before her death, are very different from each other and are set in widely disparate places, but all three concern aging and a variety of contrasts between age and youth.

Willa Cather on Writing (Knopf, 1949). Reprints the important essay “The Novel Démeublé” and two others (with some revisions) from Not under Forty, plus several previously uncollected short pieces. The most important of the essays, in addition to “The Novel Démeublé,” are “My First Novels (There Were Two),” “Escapism,” and three open letters (two having been written to editors of journals and one a private letter from which excerpts were used in Knopf publicity) about three of her own novels—Death Comes for the Archbishop, Shadows on the Rock, and The Professor's House.

Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912, edited by Virginia Faulkner, with Introduction by Mildred R. Bennett (University of Nebraska Press, 1965). A useful place to find many of Cather's earlier stories (up to 1912) that were not included in any of her volumes of short fiction. Organized in reverse chronological order, the volume begins with “The Bohemian Girl,” a story written by Cather shortly before she left McClure's and redirected her career, and reaches back to her first published story, “Peter,” plus four early stories published pseudonymously, for a total of 45. A reference book listing all of Cather's known stories (Sheryl L. Meyering, A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather) lists a total of 61 and gives useful information about publication history.

ART IMITATING LIFE

The summaries above have given some indication of the extent to which Willa Cather's work is autobiographical. Not surprisingly, the settings of her work were almost always versions of the places with which her life was bound up. The southern writer Eudora Welty has argued forcefully that the sense of place is one of the most powerful ingredients of literary fiction, if not the most powerful. Welty was, as a matter of fact, a strong admirer of Cather's work. One wonders if the geographic aspect of Cather's work was not a major reason.

Nebraska or a version of Nebraska under another name was the setting of several of Cather's novels—O Pioneers!, parts of The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, Lucy Gayheart, Obscure Destinies. Even Alexander's Bridge, remote as it seems from Cather's own life, has a brief but important scene drawn after a sandy island in the Republican River where she and her brothers liked to go to play when they were children. And in fact the Boston and London scenes that predominate in the book were places where she spent time in the course of her work for S. S. McClure—but of course, as an outsider.

Yet it is not really accurate to label Cather, as she has usually been labeled, a Nebraska writer. Her origins were in Virginia, and if the only Virginia settings that appear in her work are in Sapphira and the Slave Girl and one or two early stories, scholars have seen traces of her southern origins scattered throughout her work. New York dominates My Mortal Enemy and several short stories—but that, too, was a biographical setting, since Cather lived mainly in New York from 1906 on. The Quebec setting of Shadows on the Rock and the southwestern settings of Death Comes for the Archbishop, the central section of The Professor's House, and the crucial self-discovery section of The Song of the Lark were also important places in her life. Interestingly, after she had written about such places she tended not to go back again, as if she had used them up. But it was after her last visit to her house on the island of Grand Manan that she wrote “Before Breakfast,” where the landscape of the island is reproduced.

Cather's family members are recognizable in The Song of the Lark (despite the father's being made a minister rather than a businessman), My Ántonia, and “Old Mrs. Harris,” especially. Townspeople of Red Cloud and the country people who lived nearby are also recognizable—for instance, the Miner family in the Harlings of My Ántonia, Mr. Miner again in “Two Friends,” the friendly local doctor in Dr. Archie of The Song of the Lark, and others. Hill people who worked for the Cather family in Virginia reappear in Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

Cather wrote a fiction of memory. Though there is no evidence that she was doing this consciously, she might well have been following the views of the poet William Wordsworth, who defined the source of literature as powerful emotion recollected in tranquility. It seems that her memories of her early life, some of which were indeed powerful or even turbulent, served as the wellsprings of her imagination once they had settled into tranquility so that they could be recollected with aesthetic detachment.

Interestingly, at least three of Cather's major works are strongly autobiographical with respect to the experiences of central characters who are male, rather than female. Jim Burden of My Ántonia (the last name having been taken from the name of a local grocer) comes to Nebraska by train from Virginia after his parents have died. Cather was not orphaned, of course, but death had been a near presence in the extended family, and she might well have used orphaning as a metaphor to capture the feeling of displacement and loss that she felt when they moved. Jim Burden's reconstruction of his early impressions of the prairie essentially reproduce statements Cather made in letters and interviews.¹ The move of Jim's grandparents from the farm into Black Hawk and his own move from Black Hawk to the University of Nebraska and on to the East Coast also parallel Cather's own, though of course when she went East she did not go to Harvard, as he does in the book. She also returned to Nebraska for brief visits, as he is shown doing near the end of the book—and in fact, visited Annie Pavelka, the model for Ántonia, at her family's farm.² Annie had had a daughter before she was married, as Ántonia does in the book, and had proudly had a photograph of the baby displayed in a shop window in Red Cloud, as also happens in the book.

Niel Herbert, the central observer and narrator of A Lost Lady, is much like Cather, even if he is, in the eyes of some readers, a rather disagreeable character. He idolizes Marian Forrester much as the adolescent Cather idolized the charming, sociable, and strikingly pretty Lyra Garber. (But there was also a male model for Niel Herbert; see the Scholarly Edition for a detailed discussion.) The Forresters' grove and marsh, in the novel, reproduce features of the Garber farm on the edge of Red Cloud, which was also reached by way of a small bridge. The Garbers hosted dances under a canvas cover, as happens in My Ántonia, and enjoyed organizing picnics on their grounds (noted in early letters by Cather) as we see in A Lost Lady. In fact, the portrait of Lyra Garber in the novel was so recognizable that family members grumbled to Cather's brother in California that they might file lawsuit. They evidently did not like seeing her depicted as a lush and a sexual adventurer.

Last, Godfrey St. Peter, the central character of The Professor's House, was very closely autobiographical, despite the difference in sex, because of his interest in the Southwest and what were then called the cliff dwellings, the number of books he had written at the time the novel opens, and other details. One of the most striking of these is the attic in which he works, which closely reproduces the attic of the McClung mansion in Pittsburgh where Cather had her study for several years, down to the presence of the dressmakers' dummies.

Except for Death Comes for the Archbishop, where the two central characters are explicitly based on historical figures, and occasional passing references to public figures and events, Cather's fiction is not usually to be considered an example of the roman à clef, or the kind of story that is so explicitly modeled on a specific actual person that the reference is expected to be recognized. In fact, she more than once insisted that she did not model characters after specific people but made them up as composites of various people she had known. Nevertheless, the models for her characters are often identifiable, and the parallels with herself and her life are pervasive.

Because of the recognizable parallels between Cather's life and her works, much of the critical and scholarly material on her has been biographical in nature. That work has been quite valuable. Often it provides a basis for measuring what her intention may have been—though we can never be sure. Cather's irony is elusive. Often her stories and novels are characterized by a pervasive ambiguity that is thoroughly modern in its effects and implications, despite what sometimes seems to be the old-fashioned quality of her material and style.

Less often than the biographical study of Cather's work has been study that follows a historical approach. She has been considered rather apolitical, as if she stood outside her times and the public events and issues through which she lived. Yet that misconception is now being corrected. We can recognize in Cather's fiction a deep engagement with such issues as the disrupting and distressing recurrence of war during her lifetime and the divisive public debate over immigration that led to the Immigration Act of 1926. Thus Cather can be seen as an important figure in cultural studies, as well as an important figure in the history of the American novel and a remarkable prose stylist.

ADAPTATIONS

Cather willingly signed a contract with Warner Brothers for movie rights to A Lost Lady. It was filmed twice. The first film version, a silent picture starring Irene Rich and George Fawcett emphasizing the presence of railroads, opened in January 1925. Some of the scenes that had been altered from the novel were ridiculed by reviewers. A second filming by Warner Brothers in 1934, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Morgan with Ricardo Cortez, transformed the story drastically, both modernizing it and moving it to the suburbs of Chicago. Cather was furious. She was never again willing to consider allowing any adaptations of her works in other media. Her publishers regularly brought to her attention lucrative offers from moving picture companies and radio, but she steadfastly refused. When Houghton Mifflin urged her to permit the filming of My Ántonia, she signed her permission for preliminary work toward a film of The Song of the Lark in exchange for a signed statement from the publishing company that it would never again ask her to allow filming of Ántonia. The film of The Song of the Lark was never developed.

To ensure that her resistance to adaptation would be respected in the future, Cather's will specified that her works may not be adapted. Her executors have dutifully observed this prohibition, and since the holder of a copyright has the power to say what can and cannot be done with a work, no adaptations have appeared so long as individual works remained copyrighted.

In recent years, however, the copyrights on Cather's books have begun to expire, and both film and radio adaptations, as well as musical renditions, have appeared. Recent adaptations include:

VIDEO/FILM

• “Eric Hermannson's Soul.” Opera in 6 scenes. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell College, 1990. Music and Libretto by Jonathan Chenette. Performed at Iowa City, Iowa, September 24, 1993. Video and sound recording by Images Productions.
• “Jack-a-Boy.” Filmed dramatization, Phoenix Films, 1980. Written, produced, and directed by Carl Colby. Featuring Jean Marsh, Fred Gwynne, and Sebastian Fernandez.
• Lost Lady. A song cycle in jazz idiom interpreting A Lost Lady. Music by Nancy Harrow. Benfan Music, 1991 and 1992. Recorded at Sear Sound, New York, in June and November, 1993. Executive producer Giovanni Bonandrini. Featuring Nancy Harrow (vocals), Vernel Bagneris (vocals), Phil Woods (alto saxophone/clarinet), Dick Katz (piano), Ray Drummond (bass), and Ben Riley (drums).
• My Ántonia. Made-for-television movie, distributed by Paramount Pictures, 1995. Written for TV by Victoria Riskin. Executive producer David W. Rintels. Produced by Victoria Riskin. Directed by Joseph Sargent. Featuring Jason Robards, Eva Marie Saint, Neil Patrick Harris, and Jan Triska.
• “Nanette: An Aside.” Filmed dramatization, distributed by New Dimension Media, 1991. Adapted and dramatized by Rick Glintenkamp for Sandpail Productions. Executive producer Pamela Glintenkamp. Director of photography Hiro Narita.
• O Pioneers! Made-for-television movie, distributed by Hallmark Home Entertainment, 1992. Written for TV by Robert W. Lenski. Produced and directed by Glenn Jordan. Featuring Jessica Lange, David Strathavin, and Tom Aldredge.
• O Pioneers! Opera. 1990. Adaptation and lyrics by Darrah Cloud. Music by Kim D. Sherman. Performed and recorded at Boston University Theatre in February, 1990. Directed by Kevin Kuhlke and Kirk Browning. Produced by Michael Bronson.
• “Paul's Case.” Filmed dramatization, Perspective Films, 1979. Teleplay by Ron Cowen. Produced by Ed Lynch. Directed by Lamong Johnson. Featuring Eric Roberts and Michael Higgins. Included in the American Short Story Video Series.
• The Song of the Lark. Made-for-television movie, 2000.
• “Two by Cather.” Filmed dramatizations of “Nanette: An Aside” and “The Sentimentality of William Tavenor.” Produced by Nebraska TV Network, Gone West Productions, and KUON-TV, 1997.

In addition, several of Cather's poems have been set to music:

• “Grandmither, Think Not I Forget.” Music by Garth W. Baxter. 1991. [holograph]
• “The Palatine (In the Dark Ages).” Music by Herbert Elwell. 1940/1949? [holograph]
• “Spanish Johnny.” Music by John Sacco. New York: G. Schirmer, 1941.
• “The Tavern,” “The Hawthorne Tree,” “L'envoi,” and “Spanish Johnny.” Music by Garth Baxter. In “From the Heart: Three American Women. Songs for Soprano and Guitar.” T. Presser, 1994.
• Three songs of Margaret Elliot in the opera Eric Hermannson's Soul. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Notes

1. The letters cannot be quoted because she forbade the reproduction or quoting of any unpublished writings in her will, and her literary executors have faithfully enforced that prohibition. The permission of executors is necessary in order to avoid legal penalties so long as a work is protected by copyright. Under present U.S. law, the copyright period on unpublished works is 70 years after death of the author, which for Cather will be 2017.

2. Later, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Cather helped saved the Pavelkas' farm from foreclosure.