DOCSLIB.ORG

THE AUTHOR and HER TIMES Willa Cather Was Born, in 1873, D

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
THE AUTHOR and HER TIMES Willa Cather Was Born, in 1873, D BARRON'S BOOK NOTES WILLA CATHER'S MY ANTONIA ^^^^^^^^^^WILLA CATHER: THE AUTHOR AND HER TIMES Willa Cather was born, in 1873, during an exciting period in American history wh en the Middle West was settled by courageous pioneers, some from the East, some from Europe. The eldest of seven children, Cather spent her first years in the E ast, living in a lovely Virginia house that had been in the family for several g enerations. When she was nine, Willa Cather's life changed. Relatives had sent glowing repor ts of farming opportunities in the central Nebraska region called "the Divide." The Cathers were susceptible to tuberculosis and hoped the dry Nebraska climate would be more favorable than that of humid Virginia. In 1883 Willa Cather and he r family journeyed by rail to join their extended family in the small settlement west of Red Cloud that was already known as Catherton. Although there were no longer many covered wagons, buffalo, or Indians in Nebras ka, the huge prairie rippling with reddish grass seemed wild and foreign to Will a Cather. So did her new neighbors. Homesteading immigrants from all over Europe , they were farming previously unbroken prairie land. These people and this land inspired My Antonia and Cather's other Midwestern novels. Until she was ten years old, Willa Cather was educated at home, first by her Vir ginia grandmother, then by her Nebraska grandmother. They introduced her to Shak espeare and the Greek and Latin classics, and encouraged the intelligent and out going girl to think for herself at a young age. Many aspects of my Antonia are autobiographical. The fictional town of Black Haw k is based on Red Cloud. Just like Jim Burden (the novel's narrator), young Will a Cather arrived by train and then rode the rest of the way to her grandparents' house--about fifteen miles--in the straw-covered bed of a farm wagon. Her grand parents' house was exactly like Jim's. And, like him, the young Willa made frien ds with the immigrant families nearby. One of these families, the Sadileks from Bohemia, now part of Czechoslovakia, pr ovided the model for the Shimerda family in My Antonia. Mr. Sadilek, a musician, was so depressed by the bleak new country that he shot himself after breaking h is violin across his knee. His daughter Annie was the inspiration for Antonia. S he worked in the home of the Miner family, the model for the Harlings in the boo k. A year or so after they arrived on the farm, Willa Cather's parents moved the fa mily into Red Cloud. She and her mother were both homesick and ill, and her fath er didn't like the backbreaking farm work. He went into real estate loans and in surance, and Willa attended a school for the first time. In Red Cloud, as she al ways had, the girl spent much of her time math adults. An Englishman, who read L atin with her, let her help with experiments in his laboratory. She decided she wanted to become a doctor and persuaded two of the town's physicians to let her accompany them on their rounds. About this time, she began calling herself Willi am Cather, M.D. As you see, Cather not only thought of herself as a doctor, she thought of herse lf as a boy. She cut her hair very short (shocking in those days), dressed boyis hly, and was close to her two younger brothers, who called her "Willie." Not many girls went to college in those days, but it never occurred to Cather no t to. At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, the state capital, she continued to lead an independent and unconventional life. Among the influential friends s he made were two families who owned newspapers. Coincidentally, during her first year at the university, a teacher gave one of her essays to the Nebraska State Journal, the largest of five papers in Lincoln. Once she had seen her initials i n print, she decided to become an author, not a doctor. For the college literary magazine and the Journal, she described people and plac es which would eventually make their way into her books. She sometimes insulted people by publishing thinly disguised character sketches of them. As the newspap er's drama and book critic, she expressed decisive views on art and life. She was so busy during her senior year writing newspaper articles and practice-t eaching that her other schoolwork suffered. In courses that interested her, she read far beyond the requirements (sometimes more than her teachers had read), bu t she resented "required reading." After she became famous, she said that she di dn't want students to be forced to read her books, so she wouldn't let her work be printed in school editions or in anthologies. As she had as a child, Cather continued to think "like a man." She didn't accept her generation's idea that women should be passive, domestic, and uneducated. I nstead she actively pursued a literary life and a worldly perspective which gave her work universal appeal. After being graduated from college in 1895, Cather moved back home for a year an d wrote short stories as well as newspaper columns. When she was twenty-three, a publisher invited her to edit a new ladies' magazine in Pittsburgh. After she l eft the prairie she began to feel a nostalgia for the land and people of "the Di vide" which lasted all her life. She liked to say that the years between eight a nd fifteen are the most important. Her own vivid memories of those years are rec reated for you in My Antonia. For the next ten years Willa Cather worked in Pittsburgh at various jobs, and co ntinued to send columns about the books and culture of the East back to papers i n Lincoln. For scholars today, those columns form a sort of diary of Cather's th oughts on the arts and artists during her twenties. Although she practiced journ alism for more than half her life, she knew she would eventually write novels, a nd she already thought of herself as a literary artist. When she placed her firs t short story in a national magazine in 1900, she decided to devote herself to w riting fiction instead of newspaper articles. To support herself she taught Engl ish in Pittsburgh high schools for five years. By this time she had been invited to live in the home of Isabelle McClung and he r parents. Isabelle was young, attractive, and a wealthy arts patron who encoura ged Cather in her writing. The two became inseparable. Although Isabelle later m arried, their friendship remained so vital to Cather that one critic called Isab elle "the great love of her life." (Forty years later when Isabelle died, Cather said she realized that Isabelle had been the person for whom all her books had been written.) Cather's early boyishness and her later close friendship with several women (inc luding her companion of forty years, Edith Lewis) make it unsurprising that she never married. Although the nature of these friendships remains a matter of spec ulation, Cather herself always claimed that generally art and marriage don't mix because an artist must become a "human sacrifice" to the god of art. Eventually, Cather's single-mindedness paid off. Her poetry and short stories dr ew the attention of the New York publisher S.S. McClure. In 1906 she moved there to work on the staff of the famous McClure's magazine. She stayed six years, th ree of them as managing editor. While researching articles, hunting for talented contributors in Europe and at home, and meeting people in the publishing world, she still found time to write her own stories. Still, at nearly forty she had not yet written a novel. Some people have called this journalistic period a "literary detour" which delayed her career as a novel ist until the second half of her life. She herself called it her "apprenticeship ." She evidently learned her trade well, because in the next thirty years she pr oduced a dozen novels, several of which have become classics of American literat ure. My Antonia is probably the most famous. A reader must look to the novels for clues about Cather's later life. When she b ecame well known, she grew intensely private. She avoided publicity. Burning all the personal letters she could get back from her friends, she specified that no surviving letters were ever to be published (though nearly a thousand are now a vailable to scholars in libraries). Film versions of her works were prohibited. She authorized only certain of her writings to be collected. Cather wanted to be remembered for her best work, and she did everything she could to protect it fr om being tarnished by her lesser efforts. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), was influenced by the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton, both of whom Cather admired. Then she met the Maine wr iter Sarah Orne Jewett, who encouraged her to write about a more familiar geogra phical region and to develop her own style. She was ripe for this advice, and la ter commented that "life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remem ber." In the next three books, Cather found the subjects and personal style that made her famous. She drew on her memories of prairie spaces and pioneer life.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Willa Cather and American Arts Communities
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English English, Department of 8-2004 At the Edge of the Circle: Willa Cather and American Arts Communities Andrew W. Jewell University of Nebraska - Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Jewell, Andrew W., "At the Edge of the Circle: Willa Cather and American Arts Communities" (2004). Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English. 15. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/15 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. AT THE EDGE OF THE CIRCLE: WILLA CATHER AND AMERICAN ARTS COMMUNITIES by Andrew W. Jewel1 A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: English Under the Supervision of Professor Susan J. Rosowski Lincoln, Nebraska August, 2004 DISSERTATION TITLE 1ather and Ameri.can Arts Communities Andrew W. Jewel 1 SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: Approved Date Susan J. Rosowski Typed Name f7 Signature Kenneth M. Price Typed Name Signature Susan Be1 asco Typed Name Typed Nnme -- Signature Typed Nnme Signature Typed Name GRADUATE COLLEGE AT THE EDGE OF THE CIRCLE: WILLA CATHER AND AMERICAN ARTS COMMUNITIES Andrew Wade Jewell, Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2004 Adviser: Susan J.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
    Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Edited by William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A Routledge Series 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 1 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor Vital Contact Negotiating Copyright Downclassing Journeys in American Literature Authorship and the Discourse of from Herman Melville to Richard Wright Literary Property Rights in Patrick Chura Nineteenth-Century America Martin T. Buinicki Cosmopolitan Fictions Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the “Foreign Bodies” Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee Contemporary American Culture Katherine Stanton Laura Di Prete Outsider Citizens Overheard Voices The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern Beauvoir, and Baldwin American Poetry Sarah Relyea Ann Keniston An Ethics of Becoming Museum Mediations Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot American Poetry Sonjeong Cho Barbara K. Fischer Narrative Desire and Historical The Politics of Melancholy from Reparations Spenser to Milton A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie Adam H. Kitzes Tim S. Gauthier Urban Revelations Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern Images of Ruin in the American City, The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from 1790–1860 Romanticism to Postmodernism Donald J. McNutt Will Slocombe Postmodernism and Its Others Depression Glass The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Documentary Photography and the Medium and Don DeLillo of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, Jeffrey Ebbesen George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams Monique Claire Vescia Different Dispatches Journalism in American Modernist Prose Fatal News David T.
    [Show full text]
  • Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter VOLUME XXXV, No
    Copyright © 1992 by the Wills Cather Pioneer ISSN 0197-663X Memorial and.Educational Foundation Winter, 1991-92 Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter VOLUME XXXV, No. 4 Bibliographical Issue RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA Jim Farmer’s photo of the Hanover Bank and Trust in Johnstown, Nebraska, communicates the ambience of the historic town serving as winter locale for the Hallmark Hall of Fame/Lorimar version of O Pioneers.l, starring Jessica Lange. The CBS telecast is scheduled for Sunday 2 February at 8:00 p.m. |CST). A special screening of this Craig Anderson production previewed in Red Cloud on 18 January with Mr. Anderson as special guest. Board News Works on Cather 1990-1991" A Bibliographical Essay THE WCPM BOARD OF GOVERNORS VOTED UNANIMOUSLY AT THE ANNUAL SEPTEMBER Virgil Albertini MEETING TO ACCEPT THE RED CLOUD OPERA Northwest Missouri State University HOUSE AS A GIFT FROM OWNER FRANK MOR- The outpouring of criticism and scholarship on HART OF HASTINGS, NEBRASKA. The Board ac- Willa Cather definitely continues and shows signs of cepted this gift with the intention of restoring the increasing each year. In 1989-1990, fifty-four second floor auditorium to its former condition and articles, including the first six discussed below, and the significance it enjoyed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Among the actresses who appeared on five books were devoted to Cather. In 1990-91, the its stage was Miss Willa Cather, who starred here as number increased to sixty-five articles, including the Merchant Father in a production of Beauty and those in four collections, and eight books.
    [Show full text]
  • Newsletter & Review
    NEWSLETTER & REVIEW Volume 56, No. 2 Spring 2013 For really bad weather I wear knickerbockers Then really I like the work, grind though it is In addition to painting the bathroom and doing the house work and trying to write a novel, I have been becoming rather “famous” lately Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places I have some white canvas shoes with red rubber soles that I got in Boston, and they are fine for rock climbing When I am old and can’t run about the desert anymore, it will always be here in this book for me Is it possible that it took one man thirty working days to make my corrections? I think daughters understand and love their mothers so much more as they grow older themselves The novel will have to be called “Claude” I tried to get over all that by a long apprenticeship to Henry James and Mrs. Wharton She is the embodiment of all my feelings about those early emigrants in the prairie country Requests like yours take a great deal of my time Everything you packed carried wonderfully— not a wrinkle Deal in this case as Father would have done I used to watch out of the front windows, hoping to see Mrs. Anderson coming down the road And then was the time when things were very hard at home in Red Cloud My nieces have outlived those things, but I will never outlive them Willa Cather NEWSLETTER & REVIEW Volume 56, No.
    [Show full text]
  • Review of Youth and the Bright Medusa by Willa Cather Mark A
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Spring 2010 Review of Youth and the Bright Medusa by Willa Cather Mark A. Robison Union College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the American Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, and the United States History Commons Robison, Mark A., "Review of Youth and the Bright Medusa by Willa Cather" (2010). Great Plains Quarterly. 2583. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2583 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 238 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 2010 a Nebraska homesteader agonizingly recon­ nects with Boston's music scene; a deceased sculptor is returned to his barren Kansas hometown; a consumptive diva combats isola­ tion on Wyoming's High Plains. Cather's col­ lection, with its celebration of urban settings and unflattering portrayals of Plains life, seems almost to abandon admiration of western land­ scapes. The Willa Cather Scholary Edition of Youth and the Bright Medusa published by the University of Nebraska Press furnishes Cather's stories with a richly complex background that deepens readings of issues such as the author's geographical leanings. Mark J. Madigan's suc­ cinctly informative historical essay discusses sources and character prototypes for the eight stories and surveys original publication process and public reception. Numerous photographs and illustrations acquaint readers with places and people associated with the stories while Youth and the Bright Medusa.
    [Show full text]
  • 51Pring
    In This Issue... -The Cather Foundation dedicates this issue of the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review to Don Connors. longtime board member who passed away recently -Joe Urgo introduces readers to Tim Hoheisel. the new Executive Director of the New letter & Review Cather Foundation -Melissa DeFrancesco gener- ates new insights into Death Comes.k)r the Archbishop -Cathy Bao Bean provides a fresh response to The Song of the Lark ~Bruce Baker brings to Newsletter & Review readers a recently discovered letter which provides yet another example of Cather’s meticulous research 51pring -Judith Johnston traces a revealing professional relationship that Cather 2<o)(o!8 cultivated ~Barbara Wiselogel writes about her favorite book. O Pioneers! ~Erika Koss takes readers on a journey to The Mourn. home of Edith Wharton. one of Willa Cather’s contemporaries -Ann Moseley and Cindy Bruneteau present the 2006 bibliography of Cather scholarship Optima dies ... prima fugit The newly acquired Willa Cather Memorial Prairie is in various stages of restoration--the landscape is changing. Betty Kort A significant grant from the Nebraska Environmental Trust Managing Editor, Willa Cather Newsletter & Review is providing the means to move ahead dramatically to return the prairie to its pre-settlement state. Native grasses are being The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and coaxed to return in greater abundance, along with a significant cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing .... The changes seemed beantiful and list of wildflowers and forbs, some being on the endangered harmonious to me: it was like watching the growth of a great man list.
    [Show full text]
  • Willa Cather: Male Roles and Self-Definition in My Antonia, the Professor's House, and "Neighbor Rosicky"
    Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2006-11-15 Willa Cather: Male Roles and Self-Definition in My Antonia, The Professor's House, and "Neighbor Rosicky" Kristina Anne Everton Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the Classics Commons, and the Comparative Literature Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Everton, Kristina Anne, "Willa Cather: Male Roles and Self-Definition in My Antonia, The Professor's House, and "Neighbor Rosicky"" (2006). Theses and Dissertations. 821. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/821 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. WILLA CATHER: MALE ROLES AND SELF DEFINITION IN MY ÁNTONIA , THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE AND “NEIGHBOR ROSICKY” by Kristina Everton Ashton A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature Brigham Young University December 2006 BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY GRADUATE COMMITTEE APPROVAL of a thesis submitted by Kristina Everton Ashton This thesis has been read by each member of the following graduate committee and by majority vote has been found to be satisfactory. ______________________ ________________________________________
    [Show full text]
  • Money in the Fiction of Willa Cather Vincent A
    Loma Linda University TheScholarsRepository@LLU: Digital Archive of Research, Scholarship & Creative Works Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects 7-1974 Money in the Fiction of Willa Cather Vincent A. Clark Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsrepository.llu.edu/etd Part of the Fiction Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Clark, Vincent A., "Money in the Fiction of Willa Cather" (1974). Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects. 554. https://scholarsrepository.llu.edu/etd/554 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by TheScholarsRepository@LLU: Digital Archive of Research, Scholarship & Creative Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects by an authorized administrator of TheScholarsRepository@LLU: Digital Archive of Research, Scholarship & Creative Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. I,OMA LINDA UNIVERSITY Graduate School MONEY IN THE FICTION O'F WILL..~ CATHER by Vincent A. Clark ------·--- A Thesis in Partial Fulfillment Master of Arts in the Field of English .July 1974 Each person whose signature appears below certifies that this thesis in his opinion thesis for the degree Master of Arts. ;). ~~Delmar I. Davis, i)~cU'""""""-)~t-J.--"------Professor of _LvlJr IT". U~ -·--· -- Robert Pg Dunn 1 Associate Professor of English CONTENTS ., .L. Introduction 1 2. Money in the Life of Willa Cather 8 3. The Early Books . 16 4. The Pioneer Triumphant • . 25 5. Mammon and the Modern World 40 6. The Days That Are No More . 71 7. Conclusion: Money in the Fiction of Willa Cather .• 80 Notes ...
    [Show full text]
  • Newsletter & Review
    NEWSLETTER & REVIEW Volume 59 z No. 2 Fall z Winter 2016 “Intrigued by the Cubist” Cather in translation Paul’s Pittsburgh: Inside “Denny & Carson’s” Willa Cather NEWSLETTER & REVIEW Volume 59 z No. 2 | Fall z Winter 2016 2 9 13 20 CONTENTS 1 Letters from the Executive Director and the President 13 Religiosa, Provinciale, Modernista: The Early Reception of Willa Cather in Italy 2 “Intrigued by the Cubist”: Cather, Sergeant, and Caterina Bernardini Auguste Chabaud Diane Prenatt 20 Willa Cather and Her Works in Romania Monica Manolachi 9 News from the Pittsburgh Seminar: Inside “Denny & Carson’s” 26 “Steel of Damascus”: Iron, Steel, and Marian Forrester Timothy Bintrim and James A. Jaap Emily J. Rau On the cover: Le Laboureur (The Plowman), Auguste Chabaud, 1912. Letter from collection of Cather materials. Plans took shape for a classroom, the Executive Director library, and study center to accommodate scholarly research and Ashley Olson educational programs. We made plans for an expanded bookstore, performer greenroom, and dressing rooms to enhance our Red Cloud Opera House. Our aspirations to create an interpretive Nine years ago this month, I came home to Red Cloud and museum exhibit were brought to life. And, in the midst of it all, interviewed for a position at the Willa Cather Foundation. I supporters near and far affirmed their belief in the project by listened attentively as executive director Betty Kort addressed making investments, both large and small. plans for the future. Among many things, she spoke of a Nine years later, the National Willa Cather Center is nearly historic downtown building known as the Moon Block.
    [Show full text]
  • Cather and the Turner Thesis: Reimagining America's Open Frontier Tonya Ann Tienter Iowa State University
    Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2015 Cather and the Turner thesis: reimagining America's open frontier Tonya Ann Tienter Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Environmental Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Tienter, Tonya Ann, "Cather and the Turner thesis: reimagining America's open frontier" (2015). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 14472. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/14472 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cather and the Turner Thesis: Reimagining America’s open frontier by Tonya Tienter A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Literature) Program of Study Committee: Matthew Wynn Sivils, Major Professor Linda Shenk Julie Courtwright Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2015 Copyright © Tonya Tienter, 2015. All rights reserved ii DEDICATION I would like to dedicate my Master’s thesis to my grandparents, Carolyn and Leland Tienter. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………. ...................................... iv ABSTRACT………………………………. .............................................................. v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2. SOWING AND REAPING GENDER NORMS: THE SELF- DEFEATING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ALEXANDRA AND HER FRONTIER IN O PIONEERS! .................................................................................. 9 CHAPTER 3. FRONTIER, FEMALE, CATHER, CLAUDE: NATURE AS A VEHICLE FOR STORYTELLING IN ONE OF OURS ......................................
    [Show full text]
  • A Willa Cather Collection
    Colby Quarterly Volume 8 Issue 2 June Article 6 June 1968 A Willa Cather Collection Richard Cary Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, series 8, no.2, June 1968, p.82-95 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Cary: A Willa Cather Collection 82 Colby Library Quarterly under his feet" (p. 283), he can realistically assess life as com­ pounded of two great forces-love and death-and "face with fortitude the Berengaria and the future" (p. 283). A WILLA CATHER COLLECTION By RICHARD CARY s the end of the past decade approached, the Division of A Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Colby College Library did not harbor any appreciable amount of Willa Cather memo­ rabilia among its more than fifty special author collections. Apart from her basal value as possibly the best of America's female novelists, there were at least two reasons why her works might have been included: 1) she is buried in nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire, thus providing us a regional claim; 2) she was a protegee and avowed disciple of Sarah Orne Jewett, without peer Maine's most perceptive delineatrist. This consociation in­ spired Miss Cather to dedicate 0 Pioneers! "To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures"; and to compile The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston, 1925), in the preface of which she declared: "If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs." Despite these compelling motivations, only a few fugitive items of secondary bearing and several letters, de­ sultorily donated, marked the extent of our Cather holdings­ until 1959.
    [Show full text]
  • My Antonia.Pdf
    Antonia FM 12/12/01 2:51 PM Page i My Antonia` Willa Sibert Cather WITH RELATED READINGS THE EMC MASTERPIECE SERIES Access Editions EMC/Paradigm Publishing St. Paul, Minnesota Antonia FM 12/12/01 2:51 PM Page ii Staff Credits Laurie Skiba Valerie Murphy Managing Editor Editorial Assistant Brenda Owens Lori Ann Coleman High School Editor Editorial Consultant Becky Palmer Shelley Clubb Associate Editor Production Manager Nichola Torbett Jennifer Wreisner Associate Editor Senior Designer Jennifer Anderson Leslie Anderson Assistant Editor Senior Design and Production Specialist Paul Spencer Parkwood Composition Art and Photo Researcher Compositor Cover photo of Webster County, Nebraska: © Farrell Grehan/CORBIS Cover Photo of Willa Cather: © Bettmann/CORBIS Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cather, Willa, 1873-1947. My Ántonia / Willa Sibert Cather. p. cm. – (The EMC Masterpiece Series Access Editions) Contents: My Ántonia – Introduction to the 1926 edition / by Willa Cather – Letter to Frances Samlund / by Anna Pavelka – [Excerpt] from History of the State of Nebraska / by William G. Cutter and A.T. Andreas – The Fir Tree / by Hans Christian Andersen – Mint Snowball / Naomi Shihab Nye – The Prairie Grass Dividing / by Walt Whitman –Riding into California / by Shirley Geok-lin Lim – Plot analysis of My Ántonia – Creative writing activities – Critical writing activities –Projects. Summary: In the late nineteenth century, a fourteen-year-old immi- grant girl from Bohemia and a ten-year-old orphan boy arrive in Black Hawk, Nebraska, and in teaching each other, form a friendship that will last a lifetime. ISBN 0-8219-2509-1 1. Frontier and pioneer life—Fiction.
    [Show full text]