Prof. John H. Flannigan
For Fans of Willa Cather
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Admirers of the writings of the American author Willa Cather (1873-1947) should consult the web page of the Willa Cather Foundation, which contains useful information about Cather's life and works.
Look for broadcasts on your local PBS station of the PBS film American Masters: Willa Cather: The Road Is All, a recent (Sept. 2005) television special. For reviews and discussions, check the following links:
Transcript of Online Discussion with Joel Geyer and Richard Giannone, Washington Post (8 Sep. 2005)
Ned Martel, New York Times (7 Sep. 2005)
Jeff Korbelik, Lincoln Journal Star (3 Sep. 2005)
L. Kent Wolgamott, Lincoln Journal Star (4 Sep. 2005)
Remembering Susan J. Rosowski (1942-2004)
On 2 November 2004, Susan J. Rosowski (1942-2004), the Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a pre-eminent Cather scholar, died from cancer. For many years, Dr. Rosowski worked tirelessly to popularize Cather's works, and the "Cather Renaissance" that has flourished since the 1980s is due in large part to Dr. Rowoski's dedication and energy. Her brilliant teaching, writing, and editing skills were matched by her enthusiasm, kindness, and warmth. and she became a close friend and advisor to many members of the Cather Community. (A casual conversation I had with her at a graduate student conference in Lincoln in 1990 was a seminal event for me and prompted me to re-read and re-think all of Cather's works.) She offered encouragement and good advice to all who knew her, and her published works will stand for decades as models of clarity and probity. Click on the following links to read some of the tributes to Dr. Rosowski. Also, hunt down Rosowski's excellent book, "The Voyage Perilous": Willa Cather's Romanticism (Lincoln, U of Nebraska P, 1986) and her many, many published essays. You will be enriched by the encounter.
"Rosowski was a Pioneer in Cather Studies" (University of Nebraska College of Arts and Sciences)
"Nation's 'premier Cather scholar dies" (Cindy Lange-Kubick, Lincoln Journal Star [Nov. 3, 2004])
Cather Bibliographies
See Mark Jackson's bibliography of Cather (covering 1986-2004).
Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay also has prepared a good bibliography of Cather criticism. Click here to view it.
Cather's Nebraska Years
Although she was born in Winchester, Virginia (7 Dec. 1873), Willa Cather moved with her parents to Webster County, Nebraska, in April 1883. The family lived for a time with Cather's grandparents in the small settlement of Catherton, about twelve miles northwest of Red Cloud. In September 1884, Cather's parents settled in Red Cloud. Cather's childhood in Red Cloud furnished many of the settings and characters of her fiction, particularly for her most popular novel, My Ántonia (1918). This thinly disguised exploration of her childhood and adolescence in and around Red Cloud has some of her most rhapsodic writing.
"All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, lilke a hero's death--heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day." (My Ántonia [1918])
But even in this novel Cather was not sentimental about life on the prairie, and in much of her work she explores the dark side of pioneer life--the loneliness, the poverty, the mismatched marriage partners, the droughts, the floods, the horrible winters, and the sweltering summers. In the brilliant story "A Wagner Matinée" (1904), Cather writes about a Nebraska woman, closely modeled on her aunt Frances Cather, who visits Boston to settle an estate. Her nephew takes her to a symphony concert of Wagner's music and reopens old wounds.
"She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. 'I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!' I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards, naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door."
The Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, Red Cloud, Nebraska, June 1993
Nonetheless, the State of Nebraska has paid tribute to Cather's memory by designating many places in and around Red Cloud as historical sites. Today visitors can follow road signs in "Catherland" and visit houses, graveyards, and towns immortalized in Cather's fiction. One site, the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, consists of 610 acres of beautiful grassland located just south of Red Cloud close to the Kansas-Nebraska border. The Prairie is not far from the restored Burlington railroad depot that figures memorably in Cather's fiction, especially the story "The Sculptor's Funeral" (1904) and the opening sections of My Ántonia (1918) and Lucy Gayheart (1935). In 1962, the State of Nebraska honored Cather by admitting her to the Nebraska Hall of Fame. Visitors to the magnificent Nebraska State Capitol at Lincoln can tour the Hall of Fame, which contains busts of Cather and other notable Nebraskans such as General John J. Pershing and Fr. Edward Flanagan of Boys' Town; authors Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mari Sandoz, Loren Eisley, and John G. Neihardt; and political figures such as George Norris and William Jennings Bryan.
The Pittsburgh Years
In July 1896, after graduating from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and visiting Chicago for the first time, Cather landed an editorial job in Pittsburgh with the Home Monthly. She also continued her career as a music and theatre critic for newspapers in Pittsburgh and Lincoln. These were great days for Cather—she regularly attended the theatre, interviewed touring celebrities, went to recitals at the new Carnegie Music Hall (scroll down to view a photo of the interior of the Hall) in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, and heard some of the best singers and conductors of the era in performance. Cather also was befriended by the noted Pittsburgh composer Ethelbert Nevin and wrote a moving tribute to him on his death in 1901. (Much later, Cather would base the character of Valentine Ramsay in "Uncle Valentine" [1929] on Nevin's life.) Later she taught in several Pittsburgh high schools. Her first book, April Twilights (poetry), was published in 1903 while Cather was living in Pittsburgh, as was her first volume of short fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). One of the best stories from this collection, "Paul's Case," is a faithful portrayal of Pittsburgh city life, including an important scene at the Carnegie Music Hall and Art Museum. Cather made lasting friendships with several Pittsburghers, but by far the most important friendship was with Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected Pittsburgh family. Isabelle's father, Judge Samuel McClung, had presided over the 1892 trial of anarchist Alexander Berkman, the would-be assassin of tycoon Henry Clay Frick. From their meeting in 1899 until Isabelle's death in Sorrento, Italy, in 1938, Cather and Isabelle were devoted companions. Late in her life, Cather said that "all my books were written for Isabelle." Around 1901, Isabelle invited Cather to join the McClung household, and Cather lived in the family's home until she took a job with McClure's in New York in 1906. Many of the stories in The Troll Garden, including "Paul's Case," were written in this home. Even after her move to New York, Cather frequently broke her cross-country train trips to spend time with the McClung family in Pittsburgh.
The Judge McClung Family Home, Squirrell Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, Sept. 1996
Cather in Colorado
Although Cather never lived in Colorado, the state figures prominently in her fiction. Moonstone, Colorado, a fictionalized version of Red Cloud, Nebraska, is the setting for the early sections of The Song of the Lark (1915), and Cather based the Tom Outland section of The Professor's House (1925) on a 1916 visit to Mesa Verde National Park, near the Four Corners region. During that visit, made while the park was still privately owned by the Wetherill family, Cather and her companion Edith Lewis became separated from their guide and spent a lonely but unforgettable night in the mesa's canyons.
Mesa Verde National Park, Cortez, CO, Aug. 1984
Cather in New York
Although the name "Willa Cather" conjures up images of Nebraska and New Mexico, Cather actually spent most of her life in New York City, first as a resident of Greenwich Village in its heyday and later at the more sedate intersection of Park Avenue and 63rd Street. Cather moved to New York in 1906 when Samuel S. McClure, the founder of McClure's Magazine, offered her a job. Cather found lodgings on Washington Square and worked at the magazine's offices on 23rd Street, rising to the post of managing editor before she quit to write full time. Cather developed a strong attachment to McClure, who asked her to ghost write his autobiography. (Recently, the University of Nebraska Press released The Autobiography of S. S. McClure with Cather's name included as its actual author.) In her memoir entitled Willa Cather Living (1953), Cather's companion Edith Lewis, who lived with Cather from 1906 until Cather's death in 1947, wrote nostaligically of their love affair with New York.
After we had made the apartment [at 5 Bank Street] fairly comfortable, we gave no more thought to acquiring new things, or getting better ones than those we had. What money we had we preferred to spend on flowers, music, and entertaining our friends.
We went constantly to the opera at this time. It was one of the great periods of opera in New York. Nordica and the de Reszkes, Melba and Calvé were still singing during our first years in New York. From 1905 on our old programmes continually list such names as Sembrich, Farrar, Chaliapin, Plançon, Destinn, Renaud, Mary Garden, Caruso, Amato, Homer, and Tetrazzini. Toscanini, not then half so famous, but at the height of his powers, was conducting two or three times a week at the Metropolitan. (89-90)
Despite her long tenure in New York, however, Cather wrote comparatively little fiction that is set there. Early stories such as "Behind the Singer Tower" and "Paul's Case" make effective use of the urban landscape, and "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920) and My Mortal Enemy (1926) from Cather's mature period pay more overt homage to New York. But aside from these, there is little in Cather's output that betrays Cather's close connections to the city. In later years, she grew disenchanted with New York; after her beloved apartment at 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village was slated for demolition in 1927, Cather and Edith Lewis lived a nomadic existence from hotel to hotel before settling into a comfortable flat at 570 Park Avenue. The city's congestion and noise eventually wore Cather down, and for a time she considered relocating to San Francisco. She never followed through on her plans to leave, however, and until her final illness she took frequent walks in nearby Central Park and was a frequent patron of the Society Library. Cather's apartment became a convenient stopping-off point for the Menuhin family, whom Cather had met in 1931 and whose son, the great violinist and child prodigy Yehudi (1916-1999), and daughters Hephzibah (1920-1981) and Yaltah (1921-2001), stored their sleds at Cather's apartment because of its proximity to the Park.
Most of the New York venues that appear in Cather's fiction are gone: the first Madison Square Garden, the Singer Tower, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the old Metropolitan Opera House, and Sherry's Restaurant have long since disappeared. The area around Washington Square, however—congested, colorful, and slightly raffish—retains to this day much of the flavor with which Cather associated it in 1906. The vanished house at 5 Bank Street, just off Greenwich Avenue near St. Vincent's Hospital, where Cather lived from 1913 to 1927, is remembered today with a plaque honoring the spot where the author of My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archibishop lived and worked, and Poet's Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side commemorates Cather with an inscription containing a quotation from her novel The Professor's House.
Cather in New Hampshire
In 1917, Cather responded to an invitation by Isabelle McClung Hambourg and her husband, Jan, to join them at the Shattuck Inn, a hotel in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, not far from the Massachusetts state line. This was the first of many visits Cather and Edith Lewis made to Jaffrey. It proved to be an ideal place for Cather to write, read proofs, and relax, for the owners of the hotel jealously guarded Cather's privacy. During Cather's first visit, friends of Cather's from Pittsburgh who were renting a home nearby erected a tent on their land and allowed Cather its use. It was in this tent in the summer of 1917 that much of My Ántonia was written. Years later, Edith Lewis described the experience of reading proofs with Cather:
We read the proofs of My Ántonia together in Jaffrey early the following summer [1918]. Willa Cather liked to read proofs out of doors whenever it was possible; and one could always find convenient rocks to sit against in the woods near the Shattuck Inn. Those were wonderful mornings, full of beauty and pleasure. I remember how the chipmunks used to flash up and down along the trunks of the trees as we worked, and a mole would steal out of its hole near us and slide like a dark shadow along the ground. The air seemed full of the future–a future of bright prospects, limitless horizons. (Willa Cather Living 106).
Cather's only surviving letter to Edith Lewis, written from Jaffrey to Lewis in New York in October 1936, is among the author's warmest and most deeply felt pieces of writing. It contains rapturous descriptions of the moonlit forests beyond the Shattuck Inn, Cather's eager anticipation of an early-evening display of Jupiter and Venus, and the happiness that comes from sleeping deeply in the crisp night air (5 Oct. 1936, Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Historical Museum). The letter is a poignant example of the pleasures denied to general readers by the terms of Cather's 1943 will, which prohibits the reproduction or publication of any of her correspondence. Instead, scholars are required to visit those various research libraries (the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, etc.), where major collections of Cather's correspondence are housed.
Her strong feelings about Jaffrey continued even during periods when illness and advanced age prevented Cather from venturing beyond New York. Ultimately, Jaffrey became Cather's final resting place. After Cather died in her New York apartment on 24 April 1947, Edith Lewis arranged for her companion's burial in the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey Center, not far from Mount Monadnock. Whether the decision for Cather to be buried in Jaffrey was her own or Edith Lewis's, it is interesting to speculate that it may have been suggested by a line from Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, which Cather saw during its New York run in 1938. Cather had written an enthusiastic letter to Wilder expressing her admiration for the play, a letter that Wilder's biographer, Gilbert A. Harrison quoted directly in his 1983 Wilder biography The Enthusiast (and, in doing so, probably ran afoul of Cather's will). Perhaps Cather had been moved by a moment near the beginning of Act III when the character of the Stage Manager muses on the tranquility of the cemetery in Grover's Corners. After speaking of the towns that are visible from the burial ground (among which is Jaffrey), the Stage Manager tells the audience, "I often wonder why people like to be buried in Woodlawn and Brooklyn when they might pass the same time up here in New Hampshire." Upon her death in 1972, Lewis herself was buried in a plot adjoining Cather's