If you’ve been wondering why there have been so many notes on Willa Cather, it’s because I think some of her work is wonderful. I wish that her short story “Paul’s Case,” covered Dec. 10, was better known.
How did I come to read her?
What education I have comes from the public library. I met her there.
Years ago, I discovered that the University of Minnesota published the Minnesota Pamphlet Series. Each pamphlet contained an essay on an American writer. I could skim through one and decide whether a writer was likely to interest me.
I was young then. There were so many writers I didn’t know. And I didn’t know which to try to read first.
The pamphlets gave me a place to start. I am grateful to the unknown librarian who insisted on acquiring the complete set.
Dorothy Van Ghent wrote “Willa Cather” for the series. I found it republished in Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Maureen Howard; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Van Ghent’s essay captures the Cather I love. Cather advised aspiring writers to forget about literary devices. She believed that when we humans find our material, we tell our story intuitively, instinctively. The form we make fits the material.
As Cather put it: “We come to rely on the thing by which our feet find the road home on a dark night.”
Van Ghent’s view: At her best, Willa Cather brings us the world of the senses, not of great themes or worldviews.
If you’re thinking about trying a Willa Cather story, Van Ghent recommends “Neighbor Rosicky” and “Old Mrs. Harris.”
I think “Neighbor Rosicky” was Cather’s masterpiece.
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