Willa Cather Remembered

Willa Cather Remembered

Author: L. Brent Bohlke

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780803273337

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The Willa Cather whom friends and acquaintances knew is not well known to contemporary readers. Bourgeois and midwestern, she was not a member of the Social Registerøsociety like Edith Wharton nor of the avant-garde or expatriate circles, as was Gertrude Stein, nor was she a member of the "lost generation" of the younger F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In the 1920s Cather turned fifty and was intent on fully developing her talent, writing six major novels during that decade. Willa Cather Remembered comprises reminiscences of the author written between the 1920s and 1980s by people ranging from close friends to journalistic observers and acquaintances. The materials are drawn from newspapers and journals, portions of books, and a few previously unpublished personal letters or reflections. Many of the writers knew Cather for many years; others knew her at a particular time and place, and a few only saw her in passing. Some are celebrities, such as Truman Capote; others are lesser-known but important names, such as Henry Seidel Canby, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and Fanny Butcher, editor of the Chicago Tribune book section. A few of the commentators, though they may have respected Cather in one way or another, are highly critical of her; others are unabashed admirers. All, however, present Cather as a memorable character with an unmistakable presence. These recollections by people who knew Cather throughout the course of her professional life will acquaint readers with the woman who incited one classmate at the University of Nebraska to say, "I don't know if I like Willie, but she's never dull."


Willa Cather and Material Culture

Willa Cather and Material Culture

Author: Janis P. Stout

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2005-01-02

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0817314369

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A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather’s work and Cather scholarship. Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times. The contributors explore both the objects among which Cather lived and the objects that appear in her writings, as well as the commercial constraints of the publishing industry in which her art was made and marketed. Essays address her relationship to quilts both personally and as symbols in her work; her contributions to domestic magazines such as Home Monthly and Woman's Home Companion; the problematic nature of Hollywood productions of her work; and her efforts and successes as a businesswoman. By establishing the centrality of material matters to her writing, these essays contribute to the reclaiming of Cather as a modernist and highlight the significance of material culture, in general, to the study of American literature.


Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Author: John Joseph Murphy

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780838641354

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This book presents interprative approaches to Willa Cather based on materials available in the Drew University Cather Collection. The scholars suggest the work left to do on Willa Cather, and the diverse directions in which scholars now must travel.


Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Author: Hermione Lee

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1101973935

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Hermione Lee’s provocative and influential biography provides a sensitive reappraisal of a marvelous and often underrated writer. The Willa Cather she reveals here was a Nebraskan who spent much of her life in self-imposed exile from the prairies she celebrated in O Pioneers! and My Antonia, a woman whose life was riddled with the tension between masculine and feminine, and a writer whose naturalness of style disguised exquisite artistry. By exposing the contradictions that lie at the heart of much of Cather’s life and work, Lee locates new layers of meaning and places her firmly at the forefront of the modern literary tradition that was taking shape in her time.


Willa Cather in Person

Willa Cather in Person

Author: Willa Cather

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1986-01-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780803263260

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Cather, the Nebraska-born novelist, describes her childhood, her career as a writer, and the influences on her work


Cather Studies, Volume 11

Cather Studies, Volume 11

Author: Cather Studies

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-08-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0803296991

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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux -- Prologue: Gifts from the Museum: Catherian Epiphanies in Context -- Part 1. Beginnings -- 1. The Compatibility of Art and Religion for Willa Cather: From the Beginning -- 2. Thea in Wonderland: Willa Cather's Revision of the Alice Novels and the Gender Codes of the Western Frontier -- 3. Ántonia and Hiawatha: Spectacles of the Nation -- Part 2. Presences -- 4. Willa Cather, Howard Pyle, and "The Precious Message of Romance"--5. "Then a Great Man in American Art": Willa Cather's Frederic Remington -- 6. Willa Cather, Ernest L. Blumenschein, and "The Painting of Tomorrow" -- 7. From The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart, and Die Walküre to Die Winterreise -- 8. The Trafficking of Mrs. Forrester: Prostitution and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady -- 9. The Outlandish Hands of Fred Demmler: Pittsburgh Prototypes in The Professor's House -- 10. Translating the Southwest: The 1940 French Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop -- Part 3. Articulation: The Song of the Lark -- 11. Elements of Modernism in The Song of the Lark -- 12. "The Earliest Sources of Gladness": Reading the Deep Map of Cather's Southwest -- 13. Re(con)ceiving Experience: Cognitive Science and Creativity in The Song of the Lark -- 14. Women and Vessels in The Song of the Lark and Shadows on the Rock -- Epilogue: The Difference That Letters Make: A Meditation on The Selected Letters of Willa Cather -- Contributors -- Index


Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Author: Cather Studies

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0803230257

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"The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds; for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences---theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical---and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduoulsy exploring a diverse range of palces, ethnicities, and professions."--BOOK JACKET.


Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Author: Janis P. Stout

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2000-12-29

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9780813933603

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Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.