The first Willa Cather I read was O Pioneers. Long after college. I thought I was reasonably well read. I knew the name, Willa Cather, of course, but assumed that since I hadn't read any Cather (hadn't been induced to read any Cather as part of my many years of formal education) that her work must not have quite stood the test of time, somehow. I bought the book in the Gateway Arch gift shop in St Louis and read it on the airplane home. I think I must have expected a certain amount of schmaltz. Simple stories from the prairie simply told, perhaps.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. So, so, so, so good; unrelentingly, from the opening paragraph to the last page. Easy to see, in just that one slim book, why her contemporaries ranked her with James, Yeats, Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway.
Katherine Ann Porter wrote a short, lovely, trenchant essay, Reflections on Willa Cather, which is largely about looking (or not) for connections between an author's life and her work. Or perhaps it's mostly about Katherine Ann Porter.
> This is masterly and water-clear and autobiography enough for me: my mind goes with tenderness to the lonely slow-moving girl who happened to be an artist coming back from reading Latin and Greek with the old storekeeper, helping with the housework, then sitting by the fireplace to talk down an assertive brood of brothers and sisters, practicing her art on them, refusing to be lost among them — the longest-winged one who would fly free at last.
"Death Comes for the Archibishop" reached the public domain in January of this year. It is excellent.
Cather grew up in Nebraska, and two of the "plains novels" ("O Pioneers" and "My Ántonia") are set there. I like the first a little bit better than the second, but both are pretty good. The third plains novel ("The Song of the Lark") starts out in eastern Colorado, but the character moves around quite a bit. It is the longest of the three, and Cather has more room to develop the main character. I'm about 2/3 of the way through "Lark", and I think I like it the best of the three. The main character Thea Kronborg is interesting and complex, and many of us can understand the fits and starts you go through to figure out what you need to be doing in life.
In all of the books above, Cather has a gift for place. Her descriptions of the scenery of the west or of someone's kitchen are vivid and memorable.
In a Western Writers of America poll (https://web.archive.org/web/20111030021251/http://www.wester...), Cather comes in second in the list of best western authors. Elmer Kelton is first (the compiler noted he got twice as many votes as Cather and the third-place author [A. B. Guthrie]). I've read a couple of books by Kelton and by Guthrie, and they're both excellent as well. Westerns have turned out not to be simply the formulaic stuff I expected (though some of the formulaic stuff is fun to read!).
You could have knocked me over with a feather. So, so, so, so good; unrelentingly, from the opening paragraph to the last page. Easy to see, in just that one slim book, why her contemporaries ranked her with James, Yeats, Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway.
Katherine Ann Porter wrote a short, lovely, trenchant essay, Reflections on Willa Cather, which is largely about looking (or not) for connections between an author's life and her work. Or perhaps it's mostly about Katherine Ann Porter.
> This is masterly and water-clear and autobiography enough for me: my mind goes with tenderness to the lonely slow-moving girl who happened to be an artist coming back from reading Latin and Greek with the old storekeeper, helping with the housework, then sitting by the fireplace to talk down an assertive brood of brothers and sisters, practicing her art on them, refusing to be lost among them — the longest-winged one who would fly free at last.