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 career. She began receiving letters from readers when she was still only publishing short stories in magazines, and her fan mail surged with the publication of O Pioneers! She occasionally answered such letters, but for the most part was happier to answer letters from ordinary readers than from teachers, whom she sometimes scolded for having their students read current fiction rather than the classics. During World War II, publication of some of her works in Armed Forces Editions (special small-format paperbacks that could be tucked into a fatigue uniform pocket) brought so many letters that they became a burden, especially since they forced her to think about the misery of troops around the world.

EARLY ENCOURAGEMENT, 1903-1917

Cather often said in later life, and perhaps even believed, that reviewers had been hard on her early work. In an essay called “My First Novels [There Were Two],” she claimed that a New York critic had said of O Pioneers!, “I simply don't care a damn what happens in Nebraska,” and that when he did he had spoken for reviewers in general. It is true, there was a review of O Pioneers! in the Bookman complaining that it was boring and a reader was not likely to care much about characters in this dull place or how their lives came out. But the general tone of the reviews of O Pioneers! and of Cather's other earlier novels was much more positive than either this one hostile remark or Cather's later recollections about her early reviews would indicate.

Even her book of poems in 1903 and The Troll Garden, a volume of short stories, in 1905 were favorably reviewed in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. To be sure, these reviews were of the short, unsigned variety, but an unknown writer could scarcely expect more. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, also attracted cautiously positive reviews in major newspapers, mainly offering comments to the effect that the work showed promise. But with O Pioneers! Cather entered a period of almost twenty years during which she repeatedly and almost consistently drew enthusiastic reviews, the notable exception being the reviews of One of Ours.

Both the Boston Evening Transcript and the New York Harold Tribune—two of the country's leading newspapers—recognized in O Pioneers! a striking originality both in subject matter and in style and hailed it as an authentically American kind of novel. Reviews in the New York Times and the Chicago Evening Post celebrated it as having touches of genius, real depth beneath its simple surface, and a rich sense of “the earth, the land, patient and bountiful source of all things.” The Times reviewer, already recognizing an idea that has been developed by many subsequent scholars and critics, pointed out that a “thread of symbolism runs through it, in which the goddess of fertility once more subdues the barren and stubborn earth.” Floyd Dell, in the Chicago Evening Post, thought O Pioneers! was “touched with genius” and “worthy of being recognized as the most vital, subtle, and artistic piece of the year's fiction.” A review in the respected magazine The Nation of November 14, 1913, began, “Few American novels of recent years have impressed us so strongly as this.”¹

Cather's next novel, The Song of the Lark, also attracted strongly positive notice. Some reviewers complained of its length and excessive detail (two qualities that would not, in fact, be characteristic of Cather's work generally), but most emphasized the authenticity of its characters, especially Thea Kronborg, the hero. The influential H. L. Mencken noted Cather's steady advance in skill and hailed her, on the strength of this third novel, as a member of “the small class of American novelists who are seriously to be reckoned with.”² From that point on she was indeed regarded as an established novelist and one to be reckoned with.

RECOGNITION IN MATURITY, 1918-1929

Cather's next novel, My Ántonia is, of course, the work by which she has been best known by later readers. It was published at an unfortunate time, commercially speaking. Public attention was focused on the war in Europe, which by September 1918 had involved the United States as a participant for almost eighteen months. Even so, the first printing of 3500 copies sold out in slightly over a week, and there were two more printings that year and one the next. H. L. Mencken, continuing his important fostering of her career, actually wrote two reviews, calling the novel “one of the best that any American has ever done.”³ Randolph Bourne, who had not admired The Song of the Lark, called My Ántonia a work that could be “fairly class[ed] with modern literary art the world over.” Perceptively noting a quality of Cather's work that she herself would explicitly advocate some years later in her essay “The Novel Démeublé,” Bourne pointed out that “everything irrelevant” had been “scraped away,” leaving a structure of “artistic simplicity.”⁴ Another reviewer called the novel “a story of great truth and great beauty.”⁵ Once again reviewers recognized the quality of authenticity in the work, its originality, its reflection of a true Americanness, and most of all, the artistry with which it was executed.

It is hard to understand how, looking back, Cather could have said that there had been only one friendly critic of the novel. They were a splendid set of reviews. But that was all the more reason why the reviews of her long-awaited next novel, One of Ours, came as such a blow. Youth and the Bright Medusa, published in the meantime, had also been highly praised. But with her “war novel” Cather first had the experience of being panned, not by any means by all the reviewers, but by many.

She had known from the time she started writing the book that it would be a problem because of the fact that she was a woman. There may, of course, have been other reasons as well, but she was correct in expecting rejection of a war novel by a woman. Certainly there had already been books by women about the war, but they were, for the most part, either descriptions of the ordeal of serving as a field nurse, taken from direct experience, or lyric poems expressing grief. Women had not imagined their way into the situation of battle, nor had women who had not served in relief work (and Cather had not) attempted to describe what went on there. There was a strong bias among readers and reviewers alike toward writing from battlefield experience. Cather was swimming against the current in all these ways. But it is clear from her personal letters that she felt possessed by the subject and unable to write anything else until she did this book.

What was worse, when the reviews started coming, was that some of her severest critics were leaders of the literary world who had previously been her staunchest supporters. H. L. Mencken pronounced the novel uninformed and unrealistic, and the influential Edmund Wilson called it “a pretty flat failure.” Fortunately, as Cather's major biographer, James Woodress, has pointed out, she was spared reading Ernest Hemingway's killing comments in a letter to Wilson, in which he ridiculed the book as having been derived from the melodramatic movie The Birth of a Nation and concluded, with blatant sexism, “Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.”⁶ Although Cather won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, it was the severity of the reviews that she always remembered.

The severity of the reviews—actually, only some of the reviews—of One of Ours was only an aberration, however, in the chorus of praise that reviewers continued to sing through the 1920s. A Lost Lady, published the next year, was praised as a work of subtlety and compression. Once again reviewers linked Cather's work to the idea of quality writing. Some reviewers thought it showed she was a romanticizer, some that it showed she belonged among the realists—an uncertainty that has persisted to this day. The book was favorably compared to Henry James's works and to Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth—high comparators indeed. Henry Seidel Canby called it a “masterpiece,” and Heywood Broun said it was “truly a great book.” Joseph Wood Krutch though it “nearly perfect,” though he raised a question of whether its shortness allowed it to be called really great.⁷ These were all highly respected critics. Not all reviewers were so enamored of A Lost Lady; there were some dissenting views. In addition to the note of doubt as to whether it was substantial enough to be really a great novel—or even, to be called a novel at all—there were some who thought it gossipy or insignificant. But on the whole the book was recognized, and has continued to be recognized, as a work of great polish. F. Scott Fitzgerald told Cather in a letter written after the publication of The Great Gatsby that he thought he had unintentionally borrowed from A Lost Lady in his description of Daisy.⁸

Cather's next novel, The Professor's House, was also celebrated for its style and subtlety, though with some complaints of dullness and some objections to its puzzling structure. My Mortal Enemy, which followed, was seen, in the main, as a brilliant piece of compressed narrative, and some reviewers again called Cather America's greatest, or one of its greatest, novelists. The earlier comments about length and whether A Lost Lady could really be called a novel resurfaced with the publication of this even shorter work, My Mortal Enemy, to the point that Cather asked her publisher to call it simply a new book, not a new novel, in advertising materials.

Cather's last novel of the decade, Death Comes for the Archbishop, was again hailed as a masterpiece and a work that defined a genre of its own, neither nonfiction nor precisely fiction. She herself said it should simply called a narrative. Joseph Wood Krutch spoke of the “continuous presence of beauty” in the book.⁹

By this point in her career, Cather was being written about in critical and scholarly books, too, as well as in newspaper and magazine reviews. She had received three honorary doctorates from major universities during the decade of the 1920s, in addition to other awards. Her status as a major writer was indisputable. Yet she continued, and would continue for the rest of her life, to chafe under the adverse reviews of One of Ours, magnifying them into a belief that she had been usually mistreated or ignored by reviewers—in spite of the fact that by far the greater number of her reviews were at least positive and often adulatory.

On the other hand, as later scholars have sometimes observed, a note of condescension did, with increasing frequency, creep into Cather's reviews, as if she were just a bit old-fashioned and just a bit trite in her thinking, or as if she were certainly unable to deal with the weightier topics dealt with by serious writers. In short, she was sometimes belittled by a tinge of sexism in her reviews as someone who wrote pretty stories very well but was, after all, womanish.

REJECTION IN THE 1930S

During the 1930s the United States, like much of the rest of the world, suffered the effects of the Great Depression. Stock markets dropped, wiping out people's assets; banks failed; farms were lost to foreclosure; and unemployment soared. The suffering was widespread. In this time of trouble, critics insisted that literature must show an awareness of social problems and a willingness to emphasize society's actual realities rather than romanticize individual wishes and destinies.¹⁰ Sometimes such arguments were made in order to advance Marxist political and economic thought, but often they merely indicated the seriousness of the writers' concern about problems that seemed so severe and so complex as to overwhelm the literary topics of the past. Then, too, such calls for social responsibility on the part of writers and artists were partly made in reaction against the excesses of the fun-loving twenties.

In this literary and journalistic environment, Willa Cather suffered. Her books were almost always more timeless than timely, even though they did show, in subtle ways, an involvement in the larger patterns of history through which she lived. But subtle reflection of historic issues did not constitute direct commentary on the issues and struggles of the moment, and as we have noted, her fiction could be regarded as romantic. To critics convinced that the writer was turning her back on contemporary issues, praise of her style might seem to be only confirmation of her aesthetic escapism. She had always believed that moral exhortation and crusading for social reform should be carried on directly, not in fiction. But it was a time when many people thought the contrary, that fiction should enlist in the service of social causes.

Cather's first novel of the thirties, Shadows on the Rock, played directly into the hands of such critics, in that it was set two and a half centuries in the past and in colonial Quebed, a place far away from what seemed to most American readers the center of things. The book averted its face from the twentieth century, and reviewers who disapproved called Cather to task for it. The old charges that her novels were dull and lacked action or plot also resurfaced, and some reviewers puzzled that she seemed to have lost her way as a realist. The reviewer in the respected journal Bookman wrote severely, “There is no blood in it, no muscle, no bodily emotion … it is commonplace flavored with lavender, domesticity without domestic strife, old Quebec swept clean and fresh by human hands, but unpeopled by human beings.”¹¹ Newton Arvin, in the politically left-leaning journal New Republic, said she wrote as though “mass production and technological unemployment and cyclical depressions and the struggle between the classes did not exist.”¹²

Those reviews that praised the beauty of style that they found in Shadows on the Rock only provided fuel for the hostile fires. Praise by the Catholic press for the religious values of the novel, with its celebration of sanctity and religious discipline, also did little to rescue it in the eyes of a suspicious Protestant majority. It was falsely reported that she had converted to Catholicism. Celebrations of the timelessness of both her subject matter and her style only moved her further from the troubled mainstream. By both favorable and unfavorable reviewers, then, Cather was cast as an old-fashioned aesthete with little sense of what was happening around her.

Reviewers were relieved when Obscure Destinies was published in 1932, with its stories of the daily lives of common people. Cather was congratulated for returning to her true subject, life on the Midwestern prairies. Henry Seidel Canby, a longtime friend and admirer, wrote that the book's scenes were “the West of Miss Cather's early novels … and into it her imagination plunges deep for recollections of great souls that make a contrast and a salvation.”¹³ Reviewers praised her ability to find significance in the life of ordinary people and events. Nevertheless, the note of blame for being too nostalgic for simpler times persisted, and there was a general sentiment that after all, a book of stories could not be as significant as a novel.

In 1932, too, although there was no way she could know it and she might not have cared, novelist William Faulkner named her as one of the five contemporary writers.

The severest and most sweeping criticism of Cather appeared in 1933 from Marxist critic Granville Hicks, who, in an essay called “The Case Against Willa Cather,” accused her of “supine romanticism” and an inability to “face the harshness of our world.”¹⁴ Cather sputtered with indignation, but confined herself to expressing her anger in personal letters until three years later, when she went on the offensive against critics like Hicks with her essay “Escapism.” The positive appreciations of Cather's work continued, with a growing emphasis on her artistry of style and of pictorial effects, but her reputation had been damaged for years to come.

Reviews of Lucy Gayheart, published in 1935, did little to reverse the general view. There were again the usual appreciations, but praise of the book as “airy” or “fragile, tender, sympathetic” or for Cather herself as a artistically capable escapist continued the note of condescension even by those who took a positive stance.¹⁵ She was hopelessly branded as a “naively romantic” traditionalist.¹⁶ Her book of essays in 1936, Not under Forty, was a direct and perhaps deliberate irritant to critics, with its prefatory statement that the meaning of the title was, people younger than forty shouldn't bother reading it. Louis Kronenberger wrote in the Nation that she was smug and “self-righteous,” and in 1937 the influential Lionel Trilling wrote a retrospective on her work as a whole in which he characterized her as limited, unable to deal either with sex or with contemporary issues—clearly, in his view, major failings. Trilling dismissed Cather as “genteel.”¹⁷

RETURN TO CELEBRATION, 1938-1947

After the reviewers' various punishments in the early and mid thirties, Cather attracted less attention toward the end of the decade. Nevertheless, appreciative retrospectives on her career appeared that reasserted her importance in American literature. She was praised as a classic kind of writer with integrity and polished mastery of her craft. The Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis continued to celebrate her as being worthy of the Nobel Prize herself. He thought her perhaps America's greatest living writer.¹⁸ Much of the celebration of Cather's work, however, came from conservative religious publications, thus perpetuating the reputation for conservatism or even retrograde escapism that had been foisted on her in the 1930s. In effect, this aspect of the renewed enthusiasm for Cather in her last years combined with the slams of the previous decade's social critics to close her into a reputational box that would severely limit the interest in her work for many years to come.

When Sapphira and the Slave Girl appeared in 1940, reviews were mixed but on the whole positive. The noted arbiter of literary taste Henry Seidel Canby reviewed it as a book that deals with serious moral and philosophical issues, thus implicitly countering the dismissal of her work as trivial. Clifton Fadiman, in the New Yorker, insisted on calling it a “minor” book, but Cather's old friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a respected and well-known writer herself, spoke of it in the Book-of-the-Month Club News as a work of “golden human values.”¹⁹ Some reviewers persisted in speaking of Cather as dated and her fiction as lacking in action, but others praised her return to her earlier high level of achievement.

The general tone of the late commentary on Cather during her lifetime is summed up in the title of an essay by Professor E. K. Brown that Cather herself particularly liked: “Homage to Willa Cather.”²⁰ She could rest in the knowledge that she was appreciated, if generally regarded as a relic of a past America. But her letters demonstrate that the memories of her severe handling by the masculinist critics who took One of Ours to task and the socially conscious leftist critics of the 1930s who accused her of timidity and irrelevance rankled to the end.

A SAMPLING OF WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT CATHER

Willa Cather is “a thoroughly up-to-date woman … among the pioneers in woman's advancement.”

Pittsburg Press, March 28, 1897; Bohlke, 2

“Miss Cather herself is a hard-headed, clear-visioned, straight-forward young woman.”

Bookman, July 1905; Bohlke, 5

“When a woman writes in a man's character,—it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade.”

Sarah Orne Jewett, 1908; Letters, 1911

“My Ántonia … is not only the best done by Miss Cather, but also one of the best that any American has ever done, east or west, early or late.”

H. L. Mencken, Smart Set, 1919; Bohlke, 17

“… our foremost American woman novelist.”

Henry Blackman Sell, Chicago Daily News, March 12, 1919; Bohlke, 18

“She has a mental sturdiness … Miss Cather has never sought publicity, or quick success … she has consistently chosen the path of fine work.”

Latrobe Carroll, Bookman, May 3, 1921; Bohlke, 22-24

Alfred A. Knopf telegraphed Cather, after reading the proofs of One of Ours, that it was “masterly, a perfectly gorgeous novel” that would make her position in literary history “secure forever.” He added that he was “proud to have [his] name associated with it.”

September 21, 1921

“To live intensely—that has been the creed of Willa Sibert Cather from the days when, a born feminist, she was mayoress of the play-town of ‘Sandy Point’ in a Red Cloud, Nebraska backyard, to the present, when she has achieved recognition as one of America's foremost novelists.”

Omaha Daily News, October 29, 1921; Bohlke, 30

“She is alert, alive, quick-witted, vigorous-minded, and assertive, not at all dreamy, preoccupied, self-isolated, or diffident.”

Arts and Decorations, April 1924; Bohlke, 65

“She and [S. S.] McClure were sympathetic; they both were simple, ambitious, and straightforward. … She admires big careers and ambitious, strong characters, especially if they are the careers and characters of women.”

Louise Bogan, New Yorker, August 8, 1931; Bohlke, 116, 118

When movie star Clark Gable asked William Faulkner, in 1932, who he thought were the best modern writers, he answered, “Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself.”

Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, p. 237

George Seibel, a newspaper writer and critic who knew Cather well during her Pittsburgh years, recalled her as having “an eager mind” not only for books but also for “the study of human nature.” He said she was “avid of the world, always wondering.”

Seibel, “Miss Willa Cather, from Nebraska,” New Colophon, 1949

“A public figure through her own efforts, she steadfastly refused to play the public figure, but lived a sedulously quiet life with her close friend and companion Edith Lewis in a Park Avenue apartment. Now and then she would be seen at concerts on theatre, and now and then she would entertain a few such guests as Sigrid Undset [Danish novelist], Yehui Menuhin [celebrated violinist], or Thornton Wilder [American novelist and playwright], but most of the time she kept her distance from the world, and expected the world to keep its distance in return.”

Fanny Butcher, Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1948; Bohlke, xxviii

Mrs. Henry Seidel Canby is quoted as having recalled a dinner party Cather attended at the Canbys' residence: “Willa Cather, disliking on sight the young English journalist who made up the foursome, retired into one of her dudgeons, and when she found herself alone with her hosts explicitly requested that she might come alone to dine henceforth, unless there were someone who could be guaranteed to her liking.”

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir, 1953

“Miss Cather looks awfully like somebody's big sister, or maiden aunt, both of which she was. No genius ever looked less like one, according to the romantic popular view, unless it was her idol, Flaubert, whose photographs could pass easily for those of any paunchy country squire indifferent to his appearance. Like him, none of her genius was in her looks, only in her works. … Indeed, Willa Cather was as provincial as Hawthorne or Flaubert or Turgenev, as little concerned with aesthetics and as much with morals as Tolstoy, as obstinately reserved as Melville. In fact she always reminds me of very good literary company, of the particularly admirable masters who formed her youthful tastes, her thinking and feeling.”

Katherine Anne Porter, “Reflections on Willa Cather,” 1952; Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, 1970

The famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin wrote in his memoir that Cather was “fascinated with the Menuhin children,” all of whom were artistic, and that she thought of their lives as a “European novel.”

Menuhin, Unfinished Journey, 1977, p. 174

Lionel Menuhin Rolfe, a nephew of Yehudi Menuhin, wrote that “Aunt Willa's … life-long relationship” with Edith Lewis was “scandalous in those days.”

Rolfe, The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey, 1978, p. 50

Witter Bynner, a poet who worked at McClure's as an editor earlier than Cather did, remembered Cather's “cold harshness in refusing to let us withdraw from publication, in McClure's magazine, “The Birthmark,” which friends of hers assured us at a tense session with her in Mr. McClure's office might ruin the life, even by suicide as in the story, of another friend of hers and theirs upon whose disfigurement and dilemma it was based. I can hear her now, saying briskly: ‘My art is more important than my friend.’”

Witter Bynner, Prose Pieces, 1979; quoted in Donald Hall, ed., The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes, 1981.

Notes

1. Reviews of O Pioneers! in the New York Times Book Review, November 30, 1913: 664, by Floyd Dell in the Chicago Evening Post, July 25, 1913, and in Nation, September 14, 1913: 210-11. These reviews are summarized and quoted in the Scholarly Edition of the novel.

2. Review of The Song of the Lark by H. L. Mencken in Smart Set, January 1916, pp. 306-8.

3. Review of My Ántonia by H. L. Mencken in Smart Set, March 1919, pp. 140-41.

4. Review of My Ántonia by Randolph Bourne in the Dial, December 1918, p. 557.

5. N. P. Dawson, Review of My Ántonia in the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, January 11, 1919. This and other reviews are summarized and quoted in the Scholarly Edition.

6. Reviews of One of Ours: by H. L. Mencken, Smart Set, October 1922, pp. 140-42; by Edmund Wilson, Vanity Fair, October 1922, pp. 26-27. Hemingway's slam of the book appears in Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway's Selected Letters, 1917-1961 (NY: Scribner's, 1981), 105. James Woodress's summary of the episode appears in Willa Cather: A Literary Life, p. 333.

7. Henry Seidel Canby, Review in New York Evening Post Literary Review, September 22, 1923: 59; Heywood Brown, Review in New York World, September 28, 1923: 9; Joseph Wood Krutch, Review in The Nation, November 28, 1923: 610.

8. On the exchange between Fitzgerald and Cather regarding a possible link between A Lost Lady and The Great Gatsby, see Matthew L. Bruccoli, “‘An Instance of Apparent Plagiarism’: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and the First Gatsby Manuscript,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 39 (1978): 171-78. For an assessment of Cather's influence on Fitzgerald more generally see Tom Quirk, “Fitzgerald and Cather: The Great Gatsby,” American Literature 54 (1982): 576-91.

9. Joseph Wood Krutch, “The Pathos of Distance,” Nation 125 (October 12, 1927): 390.

10. Biographer Hermione Lee surprisingly and incorrectly labels these reviewers New Critics; Willa Cather: Double Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 328.

11. Review of Shadows on the Rock by Louis Kronenberger, Bookman, Mach 1932, pp. 634-40.

12. Newton Arvin, “Quebec, Nebraska and Pittsburgh,” New Republic 67 (August 12, 1931): 345-46.

13. Henry Seidel Canby, review in Saturday Review of Literature, August 6, 1932: 649. This and other reviews of Obscure Destinies are summarized and quoted in the Scholarly Edition.

14. Granville Hicks, “The Case against Willa Cather,” English Journal 22 (November 1933): 703-10.

15. Reviews of Lucy Gayheart: Helen MacAfee, Yale Review, Autumn 1935, p. viii; George Grimes, Omaha Sunday World-Herald, August 4, 1935. Harland Hatcher, “Willa Cather and the Shifting Moods,” in Creating the Modern American Novel (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935), 58-71.

16. Review of Lucy Gayheart, William Troy, Nation, August 14, 1935, p. 193.

17. Louis Kronenberger “In Dubious Battle” (a review of Not under Forty), Nation, December 19, 1936, pp. 738-39; Lionel Trilling, “Willa Cather,” New Republic, February 10, 1937, pp. 10-13; reprinted in After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers 1910-1930, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1937), 52-63.

18. Sinclair Lewis, Newsweek, January 3, 1938, p. 29.

19. Reviews of Sapphira and the Slave Girl: Henry Seidel Canby, Saturday Review of Literature, December 14, 1940, p. 5; Clifton Fadiman, New Yorker, December 7, 1940, pp. 103-04; and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Book-of-the-Month Club News, December 1940, pp. 2-3.

20. E. K. Brown, “Homage to Willa Cather,” Yale Review 36 (September 1946): 77-92.