Description
Book SynopsisFrom the girl in Red Cloud, who oversaw the construction of a miniature town called Sandy Point in her backyard, to the New Woman on a bicycle, celebrating art and castigating political abuse in Lincoln newspapers, to the aspiring novelist in New York City, committed to creation and career, Daryl W. Palmer's ground-breaking literary biography offers a provocative new look at Willa Cather's evolution as a writer.
Willa Cather has long been admired for
O Pioneers! (1913),
Song of the Lark (1915), and
My Ántonia (1918)—the "prairie novels" about the lives of early Nebraska pioneers that launched her career. Thanks in part to these masterpieces, she is often viewed as a representative of pioneer life on the Great Plains, a controversial innovator in American modernism, and a compelling figure in the literary history of LGBTQ America. A century later, scholars acknowledge Cather's place in the canon of American literature and continue to explore her relationship with the West.
Drawing on original archival research and paying unprecedented attention to the Cather's early short stories, Palmer demonstrates that the relationship with Nebraska in the years leading up to
O Pioneers! is more dynamic than critics and scholars thought. Readers will encounter a surprisingly bold young author whose youth in Nebraska was a kind of laboratory for her future writing career.
Becoming Willa Cather changes the way we think about Cather, a brilliant and ambitious author who embraced experimentation in life and art, intent on reimagining the American West.
Trade ReviewI cannot think of any Cather volume quite like this one. It is a welcome and innovative contribution to the existing literature. This book will appeal to the broad cross-section of committed lay readers as well as to practicing scholars." - Timothy W. Bintrim, Professor of English, Saint Francis University
"
Becoming Willa Cather sets out to account for Willa Cather's emergence as a major figure in American writing in the first half of the twentieth century—in recent years it has become clear that she is arguably
the preeminent novelist of the 1920s and 1930s, and perhaps the first half of the twentieth century. Only Faulkner contends with her. Throughout, the book demonstrates that the West generally, and Nebraska particularly, was crucial to Cather's emergence as the significant writer she became. Particularly prominent in
Becoming Willa Cather are analyses of Cather's early short stories and also some of her poetry, work that has been either unevenly considered (the stories) or almost completely neglected (the poetry) by critics." - Dana Professor of Canadian Studies & English Emeritus, St. Lawrence University
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Red Cloud and the "Real West": Mapping Willa Cather's Territorial Imagination
- Chapter 2 Writing the West Otherwise: The Short Stories of the First Decade, 1892-1902
- Chapter 3. The Road from April Twilights into the Far Country
- Chapter 4. "a ride through a familiar country": The Different Process of O Pioneers! and the Emergence of Willa Cather
- Chapter 5. Emergence, Experimentation, and Evolution: The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, and the Fiction that Followed Out West
- A Note on Texts and Abbreviations
- Works Cited
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
