This is the first of a new series I will call “Dissertation Extracts.” I mentioned in my first ever post how the PhD—writing a dissertation—is a solitary task, without much of an audience. Now’s my chance to share slices from my project. You get to see how the sausage is made.
What I want to post here are scraps from my writing that I am either, 1) proud of, 2) that I think would be interesting for others to read, 3) that I am worried might not make it in the final draft (and I spent too much time to just delete it), 4) or some combination of these. I will leave the boring stuff like lit reviews and thesis statements for my committee. You guys get the fun, compelling parts.
This short selection comes out of my second chapter focused on Willa Cather and her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. I’m concerned that I got a bit carried away with my biographic overview, and since ostensibly my academic reading audience will be literary scholars in-the-know about her life and work, I will probably end up deleting or seriously trimming this section down. But I’ve done the work already—a labor of love and appreciation for Willa—so I think it is a perfect fit for this space.
I am consistently left dumfounded by Cather’s beautiful prose. I hope you all enjoy this (very) brief biography of her life.
[A final note: I recently made a pilgrimage to Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather’s childhood home, with my great friend
. The images below come from that trip, and my experience while there enriched my love for her work.]Wilella Sibert Cather, born in December of 1873, seemed almost destined to be an author.1 At the young age of nine, when the Cather family moved from Virginia to the rolling hills of central Nebraska in search of opportunity and farmland, she was inadvertently collecting experiences for her future novels. My Ántonia (1918) finds its protagonist Jim Burden, a thinly disguised young Willa, looking up at the starry sky and barren landscape on his first night on the plains:
There seemed to be nothing to see. . . . There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. . . . But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. . . .The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither.
This must have been Willa—recalling those strange, blurry nights as her family rolled slowly out West.
As a young girl and teenager, Cather was precocious and observant. Growing up in the small village of Red Cloud (2024 population ~900), she would thrive in high school and impress her neighbors and teachers. She absorbed every detail of small-town life, learning to love the region’s cultural amalgamation of settlers, homesteaders, grotesques, and isolated intellectuals. These personalities—especially the immigrants—would become the signature of her novels, essential to her panorama of frontier America.
While in Lincoln attending the newly dedicated University of Nebraska, she set herself apart from her peers. There her love of writing and the arts emerged through her studies and regular contributions to the Nebraska State Journal. With the Journal, she had found a creative outlet and an audience; she opined on current events and regularly drafted columns, while penning reviews on books, the theatre, the opera, and more.2 Eventually she moved east to Pittsburgh to accept a job as staff writer for the Home Journal, which would be a springboard for her later editorial successes.
Cather prophesied in August of 1896, while still in Pittsburgh working for the Journal and teaching high school English, that her life would be dedicated to creativity:
There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer. That's my creed and I'll follow it to the end.
Even in its preliterary form, Cather’s lyric, mythic style of locution shines. God, truth, beauty are one, and the good life is spent in revealing that fact. One catches glimpses of the spirit of Father Latour, protagonist of Death Comes for the Archbishop, even in these writings.
But there was no time for composing novels, yet. Cather was a workhorse, distracted by the necessity of writing for and managing magazines most of her early life. (The daughter of rather poor working-class cross-country migrants, she had no endowments, trust funds, or mysterious benefactors, and she never married.) Thus, her earliest published works would be short form—poems and stories scattered across various magazines. (“Paul’s Case” and “A Wagner Matinee,” two of her most well-received short stories, were written and printed during this period. They also happen to be a couple of my favorite.)
Cather’s journalistic career peaked in 1906 when she took a managing editorial position for the prestigious McClure’s in New York City. The work was fairly satisfying for her but exceedingly tiresome—she notes in her letters that she could not both work at McClure’s and stay creatively active. Yet she managed to put out her first short novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912, tepidly received. It was not until next year’s endeavor, O Pioneers! (1913), that she would finally leave behind a life of journalism.
In the summer of 1913, warm reviews flooded in for this first of her Great Plains trilogy (followed by The Song of the Lark in 1915 and My Ántonia in 1918). Cather had found her voice and her subject in the bold, wise, Swedish-American immigrant Alexandra Bergson.
A late bloomer at 40 years old, Cather knew she must move on from newspaper work. Fiction was the career she was fated for.
As the melancholic Carl Linstrum states in O Pioneers!,
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Cather would spend a lifetime retelling and perfecting these few stories.
I am indebted here and below to Benjamin Taylor’s excellent and concise biography of Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas (2023).
With her characteristic muted wit, Cather wrote for the Journal in 1894, on the event of Shakespeare’s birthday, that it was a day when "God a second time turned his face in love toward man" (Taylor 22).
This is a great tribute and I can see even more now why you admire her style. I loved her beautiful “creed to the end”.