Willa Cather
-
Standard Name: Cather, Willa
Birth Name: Wilella Cather
Self-constructed Name: Willa Cather
Self-constructed Name: Willa Love Cather
Self-constructed Name: Willa Sibert Cather
WC
ranks as one of the major American novelists of the earlier twentieth century, and her popularity has remained undiminished while her critical reputation has fluctuated. She was a highly professional journalist and reviewer before she embarked on fiction, and she also published poetry, short stories, and ghosted biographies. Her fame rests on her rendering of the Midwest of pioneer days, but her strong imaginative sense of place also produced memorable novels with different geographical and historical settings.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Education | Tillie Olsen | At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays. Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010. 27 |
Friends, Associates | Dorothy Brett | Travelling to Taos the first time in Lawrence's
company, Brett had met Willa Cather
and Harriet Monroe
. Brett, Dorothy. Lawrence and Brett. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1933. 39-40 |
Friends, Associates | Sarah Orne Jewett | SOJ
had a broad social circle. She belonged to an artistic community of women that included Celia Thaxter
and Louise Guiney
, and counted Harriet Beecher Stowe
(whose funeral she and Annie Fields
attended in... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Alice Munro | Carried Away begins with two lonely young people building an unlikely relationship by letter. Louisa, town librarian of Carstairs, Ontario, in 1917, lives in a hotel and eats her solitary meal each day with... |
Literary responses | Katherine Mansfield | The contents of Murry's first journal edition were selected with an eye to keeping Mansfield acceptable to the public. Her biographer Alpers says it sealed her in porcelain for twenty years. Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982. 388 |
Literary responses | Alice Munro | After it won the O. Henry Prize (in the first year in which Canadians were eligible for this award) Munro described the genesis of the title story in an actual occurrence where a woman and... |
Literary responses | Sarah Orne Jewett | Willa Cather
judged the first two of these collections, and Deephaven, to be full of perception and feeling, but rather fluid and formless. Cather, Willa. On Writing. Tennant, StephenEditor , Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. 48 |
Literary responses | Sarah Orne Jewett | Willa Cather
, in her preface to a collection of SOJ
's Best Stories (1925), reflected a common critical perception in suggesting that Jewett would go down in literary history as a regional writer: the... |
Literary responses | Katherine Mansfield | Reviews mentioned KM
's caustic and observant descriptions, her freedom from sentimentality, and her peculiar touch of impishness. Some, however, found her coarse. Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982. 129 |
Literary responses | Katherine Mansfield | |
Occupation | Eva Figes | EF
had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood
, Jane Austen
, Elizabeth Bowen
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, Frances Burney
, Willa Cather
, Colette
,... |
Reception | Emily Faithfull | Historian Martha Vicinus
reads EF
's novel as a keyed text in which Faithfull cast herself as a man in order to speak and do in public what might be considered improper for a woman—the... |
Reception | Christina Stead | In 1974 Stead won the $6,000 Patrick White
Literary Award, which White had set up with his own Nobel Prize money, targeted chiefly at older and under-appreciated Australian writers. When Saul Bellow
received the Nobel... |
Textual Features | Adrienne Rich | In Culture and Anarchy (titled after the famous essay collection by Matthew Arnold
, 1869 ), Rich mixes her own poetry with the words of nineteenth-century Anglo-American women writers Jane Addams
, Susan B. Anthony |
Textual Production | Penelope Lively | PL
has published introductions to works by other writers including Ivy Compton-Burnett
, Edith Wharton
, Willa Cather
, and Carol Shields
. In September 2015 she reviewed Alison Light
's Common People: In Pursuit... |
Timeline
1861
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...
29 August 1907
More than eighty workers were killed when a main compression chamber failed and the south arm of a bridge being built across the St Lawrence at Quebec collapsed.
By 20 September 1953
Saul Bellow
published The Adventures of Augie March. Martin Amis
, in later hailing this as the first American novel to show an immigrant as a rightful Discoverer, or a pioneer,
Borne Back Daily.
21 October 2008
May 1978
Virago Press
issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.