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American Literature: The Modernist Period: Cather

A research topic guide on the modernist period of American literature.

Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) was an American writer, most known for My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

Research & Reference

Willa Cather's Paul's Case

Lost in a world of fantasy, young working-class Paul dreams of escaping his dreary existence in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. As fate would have it Paul gets his chance by stealing some money and subsequently running off to glamorous New York City. Once there, Paul experiences everything he ever dreamed of, from a luxurious hotel suite to his first taste of champagne. However, when reality finally comes crashing down around him, Paul realizes the desperate course he must now take. In a powerful and intense performance, Eric Roberts (Star 80) plays the title role in this dramatization of Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case.” As the tortured and tragic young man, Roberts brings to life this classic American story of a sensitive soul pitted against an uncaring materialistic society. As seen on PBS. (50 minutes)

Source: Films on Demand

Author's Works & Perspectives

Willa Cather: Early Novels and Stories

"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her works the Nebraska frontier of her youth. Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit. The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather's first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous "Paul's Case," a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is "The Sculptor's Funeral," about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town. O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit--an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer. 

Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings

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.  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. 

Becoming Willa Cather

From the girl in Red Cloud, who oversaw the construction of a miniature town called Sandy Point in her backyard, to the New Woman on a bicycle, celebrating art and castigating political abuse in Lincoln newspapers, to the aspiring novelist in New York City, committed to creation and career, Daryl W. Palmer's ground-breaking literary biography offers a provocative new look at Willa Cather's evolution as a writer. Willa Cather has long been admired for O Pioneers! (1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)--the "prairie novels" about the lives of early Nebraska pioneers that launched her career. Thanks in part to these masterpieces, she is often viewed as a representative of pioneer life on the Great Plains, a controversial innovator in American modernism, and a compelling figure in the literary history of LGBTQ America. A century later, scholars acknowledge Cather's place in the canon of American literature and continue to explore her relationship with the West. Drawing on original archival research and paying unprecedented attention to the Cather's early short stories, Palmer demonstrates that the relationship with Nebraska in the years leading up to O Pioneers! is more dynamic than critics and scholars thought. Readers will encounter a surprisingly bold young author whose youth in Nebraska was a kind of laboratory for her future writing career. Becoming Willa Cather changes the way we think about Cather, a brilliant and ambitious author who embraced experimentation in life and art, intent on reimagining the American West.

Willa Cather and Material Culture

A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather's work and Cather scholarship. Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times. The contributors explore both the objects among which Cather lived and the objects that appear in her writings, as well as the commercial constraints of the publishing industry in which her art was made and marketed. Essays address her relationship to quilts both personally and as symbols in her work; her contributions to domestic magazines such as Home Monthly and Woman's Home Companion; the problematic nature of Hollywood productions of her work; and her efforts and successes as a businesswoman. By establishing the centrality of material matters to her writing, these essays contribute to the reclaiming of Cather as a modernist and highlight the significance of material culture, in general, to the study of American literature.