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 story called “The Bohemian Girl,” set among the Bohemian immigrants in Nebraska. Her health was unsteady, and she had surgery of some kind in January. Returning to work at the magazine, she remained tired and irritable. In March 1912 she took a leave of absence and went to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother Douglass, who worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. This time away from the city and the hectic pace of life in an editorial office proved to be her rebirth as a writer.

Why? The answer frequently given is the southwestern landscape itself. It is true that Cather was always unusually sensitive to landscape, to a sense of place, and she did respond very powerfully to the rugged Southwest. For the next fifteen years she would enjoy frequent trips to that part of the country, most often to New Mexico, during which she rode horseback and made vigorous climbs. The landscape of the Southwest would enter her work decisively in The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. But landscape alone is not the answer to the question of why the year 1912 was so profoundly determinant in her development as a writer.

Throughout her writing life, Cather had been looking for a way of writing that would seem authentic. She had been looking for her own voice. She had written stories, poems, and newspaper and magazine articles or essays in a number of different modes. Her early stories were sometimes sensationalistic, with tormented characters and suicides. Or some of them were sentimental, with idealized child characters and stock situations. For several years she had written stories in the manner of Henry James—stories emphasizing indirect narrative strategies, concealments and obscure meanings, and social settings among the fashionable and the artistic. Some of these stories had been quite successful and had been published in leading magazines, and she had built up a following of readers.

For several years leading up to 1912, however, Cather had felt that she was not advancing in her ability as a writer. In part, this view was one that had been urged on her by the well-established novelist and short story writer Sarah Orne Jewett, whom she had met in 1908 in Boston while on assignment with McClure's. Jewett, who always wrote in her own quiet way with little regard for commercial fashions, had urged Cather to leave her job with McClure's and devote herself to her writing. She had also urged her to stop writing in imitation of others, and especially to stop writing about places and situations that were not her own, in the voices of male narrators, which Jewett believed could never be authentic for a woman writer.

Unfortunately, Jewett died suddenly in 1909 while Cather was in England making contacts with prospective contributors to McClure's. It would be several years before Cather would follow her advice. But she retained it and continued to ponder it. In 1912, feeling more and more that her life in New York was artificial and distracting, and having written a story of the Midwestern prairies set among people she remembered from childhood (“The Bohemian Girl”), she went to the Southwest and experienced a landscape that combined the open spaces of Nebraska with the steep hills of Virginia's Blue Ridge. She experienced in the Southwest what James Joyce would have called an epiphany: a moment of awakening.

When she returned from her trip, via Nebraska, and settled into Isabelle McClung's family home in Pittsburgh for a time to write, Cather was ready to put the two together: the people she remembered from childhood and a vivid experience of outdoor spaces. Combining the draft of a sensationalistic love story called “The White Mulberry Tree” with the draft of a story called “Alexandra,” about a sturdy woman farmer, she produced O Pioneers! She would later speak of it as the book in which she hit her home pasture. By this she meant that she had “come home” to material that carried a resonance of personal origins and personal identity.

Another ingredient of Cather's rich experience in 1912, but one that did not by any means confirm Sarah Orne Jewett's advice to her, was that she undertook to ghost-write the autobiography of S. S. McClure, the famous but now failing publisher of McClure's. She would later say that the effort to catch his voice and make it sound natural in that book had led to her use of the male narrative voice in My Ántonia—a statement that ignored the fact that she had used male perspective before. But the experience in writing this book (the second she had ghost-written; the first was a biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science) was important in that it caused her to work in an autobiographical mode and to think about the shape of her own life, as a parallel to McClure's. Her next novel would be a long account of the development of a woman artist. Although the woman artist in question would be an operatic singer, and would in some ways be based on singers Cather had known, especially the Metropolitan Opera singer Olive Fremstad, the outlines of the story would be strongly autobiographical.

Place was very important to Cather's writing, not only in the sense of what she wrote about but of how and where she wrote. She tended to identify spaces where she could write and others where she could not write. Moreover, her congenial spaces—those that were conducive to her work—tended to have certain structural resemblances. These, too, could be traced to memories of her early life.

In childhood, at the Cather home in Red Cloud, she had a small room of her own in the attic, up under the roof, with a low, enclosing ceiling and a big window through which she could look out over the town and the nearby countryside, gaining a sense of expansive openness while remaining cosily in her room. Years later, she tended to find similar spaces in which to write. At the McClung mansion in Pittsburgh she had a space in the attic as a study. There the family stored dress forms for use by the seamstress who made Mrs. McClung's and the two daughters' clothes. (Dress forms were torso shapes, usually made of wire and canvas, shaped according to the size and contours of a particular woman, to which a seamstress could fit dresses in progress). These dress forms reappear in the attic study of The Professor's House. At the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Cather and Edith Lewis often stayed in the fall, they had rooms on the top floor, again tucked up under the roof with a sloping ceiling. At their cottage on Grand Manan, Cather worked in another attic room. When she was in the latter stages of work on My Ántonia, she took this principle one step further and worked in a pup tent (with sloping top and open ends) in a meadow in Jaffrey. Sometimes she would move from place to place until she found a place that was conducive to writing at that time.

In her tent at Jaffrey she worked for a few hours in the morning, returned to the lodge for a substantial noon meal, and then worked for a few hours in the afternoon. At her apartment in New York she seems to have worked mainly in the mornings, doing errands or visiting and receiving visitors in the afternoons. She greatly disliked interruptions—which was one reason she was hesitant to have a telephone.

After leaving Red Cloud to pursue her career in eastern cities, she found herself unable to work in Nebraska during trips home. She was also unable to work in her brother's house in Arizona, when she took leave from McClure's—a disappointing discovery, since she had hoped to use her time for a resurgence of writing. Instead, she used it to charge her batteries. She also usually did not write during her long trips to Europe. Rather, she seems to have absorbed impressions of the places she saw, to draw on after she returned to New York—or to Jaffrey or Grand Manan—and began to work on whatever project she had in mind. Interestingly, once she had written about a place, she usually stopped going there. This was true of New Mexico and of Quebec, where Shadows on the Rock is set.

Her working method was, first, to think about a story for a long time—although the word “think” may be inaccurate, in that her material often seemed to gestate in her mind without conscious thought for a long time and then emerge in a sudden inspired rush evoked by some external experience that crystallized a range of emotions and ideas. Sometimes it was an image or physical object: a glimpse of Olive Fremstad looking exhausted after a performance in a long Wagner opera (The Song of the Lark), a simple but handsome pottery jar isolated on a table which could be looked at and admired from all sides (My Ántonia). Sometimes it was something she happened to read: a newspaper report of the death of her cousin in World War I (One of Ours), a report of the death of someone she had known in Red Cloud (A Lost Lady), a biography that seemed to sum up a quality of character and place combined (Death Comes for the Archbishop). All of these books she claimed to have come into her mind in a sudden rush, though in fact they drew on impressions and feelings she had long pondered, as well as on varying amounts of research that she did in connection with the writing process. She was a familiar figure at the New York Public Library, where the director would set aside a private room for her use.

After the idea of the work had crystallized for her, Cather usually wrote a first draft in longhand, then typed it herself and marked it up with revisions, then gave it to a typist to prepare a good copy, then marked that up and had the typist prepare another good copy, which was usually the one sent to the publisher. (We can see how the computer has reduced the repetitive work of preparing copies.) She was never able to dictate her first drafts, even though she had a stenographer available who often produced her correspondence by dictation. That fact would be important and unfortunate in her later years, when a succession of hand problems and injuries sometimes left her unable to dress herself, write a letter, or even sign a check. In those situations, her companion, Edith Lewis, was always there to help.

When a typescript had gone to the publisher, it would be set in type and returned to her in the form of galley proofs—printed runs on long strips of paper without page divisions. (Pages would be struck off later.) She would go over the galleys and mark changes and corrections. After these were entered by the typesetters, she would receive page proofs—always two sets, not the usual one, because Edith Lewis also went over a set or read them aloud with her. Page proofs were (and still are) customarily expected to be very nearly the finished product. There was considerable expense involved in making changes at the page proof stage, and it was understood between publishers and writers that changes at this point in the process should be limited to legitimate corrections, not new ideas. Yet Cather frequently made numerous changes in page proof as well.

Her practice of making late revisions was one of the major contributing factors, in fact, in her momentous decision to stop publishing with the Boston house of Houghton Mifflin (which had grown out of the venerable Ticknor and Fields, publisher of many of the classic American writers of the nineteenth century) and move to the high-quality publishing house founded by the young Alfred A. Knopf. A number of discontents fueled her irritation with Houghton Mifflin, which had published her first four novels, but chief among them were the company's charge-back of costs incurred for the corrections of page proofs of My Ántonia and Cather's dissatisfaction with the way in which Houghton Mifflin marketed, or failed to market, her books. She pointed out that Knopf was staging aggressive and intelligent marketing campaigns for his writers.

Some of Cather's revisions continued even after the publication of her novels and stories. There are several noted examples. After she came to believe The Song of the Lark went on too long and in too great detail, she cut some 7000 words (slightly over five percent of the length of this book). For a special edition of My Ántonia to be published by a book store in Utah she changed the name of a bull from Brigham Young to Andrew Jackson because Mormon readers would be offended by the use of their historic leader's name. (She specified that the change was for that edition only.) For a Revised Edition of the same novel in 1926 she greatly rewrote the Introduction, reducing its length and clarifying the relation of the narrator (Jim Burden) to her larger authorial perspective. For the multi-volume Autograph Edition of her works published by Houghton Mifflin beginning in 1937 she revised all her books, correcting errors of fact and smoothing language.

When Cather began to think of moving to Knopf, she studied the firm's list and its advertising very carefully. In the fall of 1920 Knopf published a new edition of her previous book of short stories with a few new stories added, under the new title Youth and the Bright Medusa. At that time Cather said that she still planned to send the war novel she was writing, which she was then calling “Claude,” to Houghton Mifflin. But in January 1921 she wrote her editor and friend at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet, to tell him that she had decided to go with Knopf. It was a move that was to have far-reaching positive effects on her career and readership, positioning her with a publisher whose detail work was exacting and whose commitment to her as an artist and as a longterm commercial investment outweighed smaller questions of book-by-book sales. The relationship paid off financially, as well as artistically, for both publisher and author.

During the early years of her writing career, as a journalist, Willa Cather often wrote under the pressure of deadlines. Her years of work on newspapers and magazines taught her the skills of speed and inventiveness and helped her establish the elements of a style that would constitute a distinctive “voice” on the page. These early nonfiction writings have not been much read since their initial publication except by scholars who make the study of Cather a specialty, but they were extremely important in her development. Some of her magazine articles provided material she later developed in fiction. They also provide us important insights into her thinking—the writers she admired or didn't admire, her views on women in both the art and the business of literature, her wrestling with issues of morality in art versus the demands of art for its own sake. These and more issues that are important in understanding this major writer appear in her journalism. They show us how she both reflected her time and helped shape the evolution of American literature. Unfortunately, Cather's journalism is readily available only in fragmentary form, in two edited compilations that print parts of articles grouped by topic, rather than complete articles in their original form.¹ It is hoped that within a few years a collection of her journalism in its original and complete form will be available.

While Cather was producing journalism, she was also writing short stories. Indeed, by June 1906, when she wrote an open letter to her students at Pittsburgh's Allegheny High School telling them that she was leaving to go to work for McClure's in New York, she had published at least thirty-six stories. (I say “at least” because some of her early work was published under pseudonyms and it is possible that some stories have not been identified.) From the time she joined McClure's until March 1912, when she left New York for the Southwest, she published only seven more. She had also written at least one unpublished novel, which she seems to have destroyed at the time; a ghostwritten biography of Mary Baker Eddy; and, of course, Alexander's Bridge, which was serialized in McClure's in 1912. In addition, she had written and published a number of poems, most of which were collected in the volume April Twilights in 1903. After her departure to the Southwest in 1912, she published an additional fifteen stories before her death. Three others appeared posthumously.

At one time Cather stated in a letter that she wrote short stories only because they paid well and she needed the income in order to support herself while writing her serious work, which was her novels. That statement was not entirely forthright; or at any rate, she did not always think that way about short fiction. Some of her stories, especially the later ones, were very serious work. But some were clearly potboilers—interesting, deserving of study and analysis, but essentially potboilers.

It is rather surprising that Cather should have thought of short fiction dismissively even sometimes, since the compressed form of the short story would seem to be so perfectly attuned to the aesthetic principles she enunciated in some of the self-reflective essays she published in her mature years as a writer, especially the essay “The Novel Démeublé.” This essay in particular is often cited by critics interested in her fiction because she so ringingly stated there her allegiance to an ideal of compression or minimalism. It was an ideal that was quite characteristic of literary modernism. For example, Ernest Hemingway—though his novels are obviously very different from Cather's—wrote in a severely minimalist style, and the short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, often called a “writer's writer,” was also somewhat of a minimalist.

What this meant to Cather was that the writer should not try to spell things out in detail, but instead should attempt to create an aura or atmosphere, or what she called an experience “felt on the page without being specifically named there,” that would imply the gist of an idea or emotion. The idea or emotion itself should be a “thing not named” in so many words, but conveyed to the reader through overtones, subtleties, and sometimes even silences. Details are needed, to be sure; they give a piece of fiction a sense of reality, and they establish the nature of a place or a situation. But in Cather's view only those details should be included that directly contribute to the establishment of the idea or emotion the writer seeks to convey. Everything else—all the other extraneous details that might be interesting for their own sake but are not essential to the purpose—was what she called “furniture,” and she said in “The Novel Démeublé” that all that furniture should be “thrown out the window.”

Cather did not always write in such an “unfurnished” way herself. Her third novel (that is, her third published novel), The Song of the Lark, is long and detailed. It establishes itself with a fullness that would prove uncharacteristic of her mature work, though it is not, in that novel, ineffective. One of Ours, the novel called “Claude” in manuscript, which carries its central character into World War One, is littered with details in its early sections—but there the littering is purposeful; it is a major component of what Claude wants to escape. In her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, there are many details that establish a sense of the society and place where the action occurs (the Virginia of Cather's early childhood), but she said that she threw out five pounds of manuscript that she decided was extraneous to the crux of the story. But in a novel published a decade earlier, Shadows on the Rock, Cather would seem to have been wanting to show how details of daily life actually constitute life itself. So there the “furniture” seems essential. “The Novel Démeublé” provides the key to an interesting way of looking at her work.

When Willa Cather was at work, she let the demands of the work itself lead her. Although some of today's readers may think she seems old-fashioned, she was actually quite experimental in the structural forms of her work, and she accommodated herself stylistically to the formal and emotional effects she was trying to create. Thus, although she could be quite prescriptive in her pronouncements on fiction, she was herself creatively inconsistent.

Although Cather's ideas about her purposes and techniques could often be unshakably rigid, she did take to heart the comments of a small number of friends and reviewers over the years. As we have already seen, the very outset of her writing career was the result of another person's opinion, the judgment of her professor that her essay on Thomas Carlyle deserved publication. Her favorite professor, Professor Bates, also took the initiative of sending her first published story, “Peter,” to a magazine called The Mahogany Tree that was published and read by aesthetes. The magazine published it in May 1892, when Cather was still only eighteen years old. Other friends who read her work in manuscript were Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a slightly younger friend whom Cather had first met at the University of Nebraska, and who also became a well-known novelist; Isabelle McClung, her devoted friend and perhaps lover in Pittsburgh; Edith Lewis, her companion for more than thirty-five years; and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a writer whose work Cather published in McClure's during her editorial days. Cather rightly credited Sergeant as having shored up her confidence and steered her right when she was working on her breakthrough novel, O Pioneers!

We have already noted the powerful advice given to Cather by novelist and short story writer Sarah Orne Jewett; even if she did not follow it in every particular, she did internalize Jewett's words sufficiently to redirect her career several years later. When she was publishing at Houghton Mifflin she sometimes heeded and followed the advice of the house's literary editor, Ferris Greenslet, who was not only an editor but truly a friend to her for many years. A small but notable example of the influence of Greenslet's comments is his suggestion that Dr. Archie in The Song of the Lark not be written in as having become the governor of Colorado. Cather agreed that a more moderate level of distinction would be better. Also, and more importantly, it was Greenslet who suggested that she rewrite the Introduction to My Ántonia, a change that critics have universally praised.

Two examples of the influence of Dorothy Canfield Fisher are separated by twenty years. The first was Dorothy's intervention when Cather was preparing to publish her first volume of stories, The Troll Garden, and meant to include a story called “The Profile.” Canfield (she had not yet added her married name, Fisher) insisted that it be left out to avoid hurting a friend to whom she had introduced Cather and who, she believed, would recognize herself in the story. Dorothy's feelings on the subject were so strong that when Cather refused to cut the story, she argued the case with S. S. McClure himself (who was publishing the book) and won. As a result, the two friends became estranged. They became reconciled when Cather was completing One of Ours, however, and Cather asked Canfield Fisher to read the portions of the novel set in France and to correct any errors in French language than she found. Canfield Fisher was the perfect person to carry out such a task, because she herself had been in France, along with her husband, during the war, serving as volunteers. Not only were their tastes frequently comparable (although Cather found that her friend spelled things out too much and was too tame in dealing with any odor of immorality), but Canfield Fisher was able to make suggestions about the credibility of the battlefield scenes in the novel and the descriptions of French countryside generally.

After we note these and other examples of the influence of friendly readers on Cather, we must remember that to a far greater extent Cather followed her own preferences. The primary external influence on her was not friends who read works in progress (she rarely showed anything before proof stage) but books on which she drew for historic background information, such as the history of French missionaries in North America when she was writing Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock.

Reviewers were another matter. Even if their opinions did not have a direct effect on the shaping of subsequent works or subsequent editions of the books on which they commented, Cather was keenly attuned to what the reviewers were saying and often commented on their opinions in her letters. In the latter part of her career Cather came to believe, or at least to say, that her early work had not been given favorable reviews. That was not true. From the outset she had many positive reviews. But she also had her critics (in the negative meaning of that term) among reviewers, and any adverse comments stung her to the quick.

The reception of Cather's novels, in particular, provides an important measure of changing literary taste in the United States. O Pioneers! was greeted with overwhelming praise for introducing a new kind of novel about a section of the country and a group of people who had not been written about before. Cather was hailed by the reviewer in the Chicago Evening Post as a genius. Yet in later years it was not these positive reviews she remembered but the reviewer in the Bookman who found the novel too regional, uneventful, and “depressing.” She generalized and exaggerated that mostly negative view of the book when she wrote her essay “My First Novels (There Were Two).”

O Pioneers! had been published simultaneously in England by William Heinemann, a respected press. But Heinemann declined to publish The Song of the Lark, on grounds that its exhaustively detailed method was a mistake, not suited to Cather's genius. She took his criticism to heart and never again wrote in what has been called the Theodore Dreiser manner, except in the early sections of One of Ours, where the accumulation of details serves an important purpose.

My Ántonia, probably the most widely read of Cather's books among later generations, was not initially greeted with great sales. Published in the fall of 1918, it suffered from the nation's preoccupation with the war and from government restrictions on the use of paper. In its first year the book sold only some 8600 copies,² but it “gathered momentum as the years went by” (in the words of James Woodress) and became a mainstay of Cather's income for the rest of her life.

If book-buyers were not initially enthusiastic, however, reviewers were. The famous H. L. Mencken praised it in Smart Set as “one of the best that any American has ever done.”³ Randolph Bourne, a reviewer greatly respected by Cather, had not liked The Song of the Lark but praised My Ántonia extravagantly for its authenticity and compression, qualities she would seek to maintain in subsequent books. Others also praised the book's authenticity and the fact that Cather had not felt she had to write a standard love story or a conventional action novel.

Authenticity became precisely the issue when Cather's next novel, One of Ours, was published in 1922, four years after My Ántonia. The very critics who had praised her before now turned on her. H. L. Mencken and novelist Sinclair Lewis considered the book a failure, although they praised the sections set in Nebraska, before the novel follows its central character to France and into combat. Others, such as the influential Edmund Wilson and her earlier admirer Heywood Broun, thought the book boring and trite. Actually, there were also many favorable reviews, and the book was a commercial hit—in fact, a best-seller—but Cather always remembered the negative. She persisted in thinking of herself as a writer misunderstood and scorned by the establishment, who went on her lonely way in defiance of literary arbiters.

As she continued her experimental departures from conventional storytelling, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, for example, and Shadows on the Rock, Cather positioned herself as a an aesthete who disregarded the pedestrian notions of reviewers as to what constituted or did not constitute a novel. That posture was reinforced in the 1930s when Marxist critics demanding relevance to social and economic problems, such as Lionel Trilling and Granville Hicks, dismissed her as an escapist who refused to examine life as it really was.⁴ One of the results was her proclamation, in Not under Forty, a book of essays, that younger people need not read her. The announced grandly that art had always been escapist, and she chose even more escapist subjects in her next books, reaching even further back in time and to social settings that reflected very little of the contemporary society of her own world. She became more and more antagonistic to modernity.

Cather achieved many recognitions and won a number of awards during her career. The following examples indicate her stature in the literary world:

• 1893 Managing editor of the Hesperian, University of Nebraska literary magazine; while still an undergraduate, began regular contributions to the Nebraska State Journal that brought the notice of theater impresarios for the vehemence of her reviews
• 1896 First story in a national magazine, “On the Divide” in the Overland Monthly
• 1903 Promised by the famous publisher S. S. McClure that any story she sent would be published either in McClure's or in another magazine, and promised a volume of stories from the McClure's book press
• 1905 Invited to a birthday dinner for Mark Twain at Delmonico's Restaurant in New York
• 1906 Joined staff of McClure's
• 1908 Praised and encouraged by Sarah Orne Jewett
• 1912 Invited to a birthday dinner for William Dean Howells, who, like Twain, was a celebrated member of the literary establishment
• 1915 Recognized by literary arbiter H. L. Mencken as a novelist “to be reckoned with”
• 1917 Honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska
• 1919 Nominated for the newly established Pulitzer Prize for My Ántonia
• 1922 Taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Middlebury, Vermont
• 1923 Received the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours; portrait painted by Léon Bakst upon commission by the Omaha Public Library
• 1924 Honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan
• 1925 By invitation, gave the William Vaughn Moody Lecture at the University of Chicago; repeated the same lecture at the Women's City Club in Cleveland; invited to a birthday dinner for Robert Frost
• 1926 Summer guest residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, New Hampshire
• 1928 Honorary doctorate from Columbia University
• 1929 Honorary doctorate from Yale University; elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters
• 1930 Received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Death Comes for the Archbishop
• 1931 Honorary doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley; honorary doctorate from Princeton University; Shadows on the Rock taken as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; pictured on the cover of Time magazine, August
• 1933 Prix Fémina Américain for Shadows on the Rock
• 1938 Elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1940 Pictured on the cover of the Saturday Review of Literature, December 14
• 1944 Received the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Notes

1. These are The Kingdom of Art, edited by Bernice Slote, and The World and the Parish, in two volumes, edited by William Curtin. Two valuable essays by Slote are also included in The Kingdom of Art. See Bibliography for full information.

2. For a very useful concise tracing of the production, reception, and various editions of My Ántonia, see the Historical Essay by James Woodress in the Scholarly Edition, edited by Charles Mignon with Kari Ronning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 369-401. Each volume in this important edition includes both a Historical Essay and a Textual Essay written by Cather scholars, all of them of very high quality.

3. H. L. Mencken, review of My Ántonia, Smart Set, March 1919: 140-41.

4. Granville Hicks, “The Case against Willa Cather,” English Journal, November 1933, 703-10, rpt. Schroeter, Willa Cather and Her Critics