If one doesn’t come across Willa Cather’s name as frequently as those of the other major American novelists of her time, a large part of the reason, one suspects, is that she suffers from an image problem. People who have never even read her—or who retain only the vaguest memories of having read her in school—tend to think of her as earnest, proficient, dully respectable; almost universally, it seems, her name conjures up drab images of Midwestern prairies and amber waves of grain, images which are likely to strike the typical reader as far less scintillating than, say, Hemingway’s soldiers and toreros, Fitzgerald’s flappers and romantic egoists, or even Dreiser’s magnificently wretched Jennies, Carries, and Clydes. Perhaps the most celebrated remark about Cather by one of her literary contemporaries is Hemingway’s derisive comment, in a 1923 letter to Edmund Wilson, about a battlefront episode in her uncharacteristically flimsy novel One of Ours. “Do you know where it came from?” Hemingway asked. “The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere.” Later generations may not share Hemingway’s overtly patronizing attitude toward Cather; but there does remain, in the minds of many, a perhaps unwitting inclination to dismiss her as a genteel and innocuous (if highly gifted) celebrant of frontier life.
There are few American novelists whose collected works form as substantial, and as consistently masterful, a body of work as Willa Cather’s.
