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Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Edited by Sharon O’Brien

“A treasury of riches, containing much that has been difficult to find.” — Chicago Tribune

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “The Sentimentality of William Tavener,” Willa Cather
December 7, 2023

Story of the Week Willa Cather, “The Bookkeeper’s Wife”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Willa Cather, “A Death in the Desert”
September 1, 2019

Limited Time Offer: Buy all three Willa Cather volumes in a boxed set and save $45.

Willa Cather, one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, also wrote some of America’s best short fiction. From her haunting first story, “Peter,” the tale of a Bohemian immigrant who brought his violin to the raw western frontier, to her posthumously published “The Best Years,” the stories included here span the fifty years of Cather’s writing life. In these tales of pioneers and farmers, artists and youthful lovers, immigrants and their striving children, she creates both a new, never-surpassed portrait of the land and people of the American West and a lively and contemporary picture of life in eastern cities.

Many of her finest stories, among them “Coming, Aphrodite!”—a New York tale of passion and ambition—and the subtly constructed “Old Mrs. Harris,” are unfamiliar to most readers. Her earliest, uncollected stories are steeped in memories of prairie childhood. “On the Divide,” “The Enchanted Bluff,” “Eric Hermannson’s Soul,” and others contain many of the themes of her later work, evoking the loneliness and hardship as well as the beauty and challenge of pioneer life “on the bright edges of the world.”

In the stories of Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), which includes “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” “The Diamond Mine,” and the well-known “Paul’s Case,” artists and other sensitive spirits struggle to preserve their integrity in a society ruled by convention and routine. Obscure Destinies (1932) presents three moving tales set in the western landscapes Cather loved. Her characters are endowed with some of the meditative solidity found in the portraits of Rembrandt, like the old farmer in “Neighbour Rosicky” who has only one tap root that goes down deep. The Old Beauty and Others (1948), published shortly after Cather’s death, includes “The Best Years,” a Nebraska story that has a mournful charm unlike anything else she wrote.

Cather’s distinctive, lyrical prose can be found not only in her fiction but also in her occasional pieces—an appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett, luminous reminiscences of Mrs. James Fields and her house in Boston, an account of meeting Flaubert’s niece in Aix-les-Bains. Her critical essays, such as “The Novel Démeublé” and “On the Art of Fiction,” which appear in Not Under Forty (1936), and her reviews of authors from Mark Twain to Frank Norris, as well as her appraisals of her own work, cast a discerning light on the creative role of the artist.

This volume also contains Cather’s first novella, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), My Mortal Enemy (1926), a powerful novella in which a strong-willed woman brings about her own ruin, and Cather’s only book of poetry, April Twilights and Other Poems (1933).

Sharon O’Brien, volume editor, is James Hope Caldwell Professor of American Cultures and Professor of English at Dickinson College.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings is kept in print by a gift from William Rondina to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week “The Sentimentality of William Tavener,” Willa Cather
December 7, 2023

Story of the Week Willa Cather, “The Bookkeeper’s Wife”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Willa Cather, “A Death in the Desert”
September 1, 2019

Story of the Week Willa Cather, “The Namesake”
November 10, 2017

News Willa Cather: Modernist or antimodernist?
December 27, 2016
Table of Contents

Uncollected Stories 1892-1929
Peter
On the Divide
Eric Hermannson’s Soul
The Sentimentality of William Tavener
The Namesake
The Enchanted Bluff
The Joy of Nelly Deane
The Bohemian Girl
Consequences
The Bookkeeper’s Wife
Ardessa
Her Boss
Uncle Valentine
Double Birthday

Alexander’s Bridge

Youth and the Bright Medusa
Coming, Aphrodite!
The Diamond Mine
A Gold Slipper
Scandal
Paul’s Case
A Wagner Matinee
The Sculptor’s Funeral
“A Death in the Desert”

My Mortal Enemy

Obscure Destinies
Neighbour Rosicky
Old Mrs. Harris
Two Friends

The Old Beauty and Others
The Old Beauty
The Best Years
Before Breakfast

April Twilights and Other Poems

Not Under Forty
A Chance Meeting
The Novel Demeuble
148 Charles Street
Miss Jewett
“Joseph and His Brothers”
Katherine Mansfield

Selected Reviews and Essays 1895-1940
Mark Twain
William Dean Howells
Edgar Allan Poe
Walt Whitman
Henry James
Harold Frederic
Kate Chopin
Stephen Crane
Frank Norris
When I Knew Stephen Crane
On the Art of Fiction
Preface to Alexander’s Bridge
Introduction to Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress
Preface to Gertrude Hall’s The Wagnerian Romances
Introduction to Stephen Crane’s Wounds in the Rain
On Death Comes for the Archbishop
My First Novels (There Were Two)
On Shadows on the Rock
Escapism
On The Professor’s House
Light on Adobe Walls
Alphabetical List of Titles and Authors Reviewed

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ISBN: 978-0-94045071-4 1039 pages

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N° 57 Library of America Series

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