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Willa Cather is best known by her novels -- My Antonia (required reading for us in high school, and we still aren't sure how we feel about that) and the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, One of Ours. What few people know is that she began her career writing short stories -- in fact, these very stories. Included in this volume are the highly acclaimed Troll Garden stories -- involving individuals and the art world of the time. The most important of these stories is "Paul's Case." Cather's also well known for writing stories set, like "On the Divide," in rural Nebraska. Other stories in this collection include, "Eric Hermannson's Soul," "The Enchanted Bluff," and "The Bohemian Girl," all of which show the influence of Henry James on her writing. ... Read more

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Willa Cather's childhood in post-Civil War Virginia, her adolescence on the Nebraska prairies, her love of the Southwest, and her intimate knowledge of opera and the theater provided her with the characters and setting for a dozen novels and numerous short stories. Cather's story is one of a woman who carefully guarderd her privacy while expressing her feelings and attitudes through the characters she created. ... Read more

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Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction has earned her the reputation as one of the greatest American novelists of her time. This unabridged collection of Cather's best-known works include MY ANTONIA, "Sculptor's Funeral", "Paul's Case", and "The Garden Lodge". ... Read more

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Cather's war novel
Given that her earlier works dealt with the plains of Nebraska and the pioneers who struggled to make a life there, it seems strange that Willa Cather, at this point in her career, would attempt a "war novel."She had made her reputation with such works as My Antonio and O, Pioneers! and the appearance of One of Ours was a marked departure from her earlier efforts.But like many American families, hers was touched by WWI: a first cousin had been killed in the war and his story became the impetus for this book.Cather knew that she lacked the first hand knowledge of the war so began the novel with what she was familiar and hoped that by research, a trip to France, and interviews with veterans that she could fabricate enough realism to make the war section of her work believable.She was only marginaly successful.

The section of the novel that describes Claude Wheeler's pre-war life is excellent.Here, Cather is writing of a lifestyle with which she is intimately acquainted and her wonderful descriptive prose is full of life and flows nicely.This is a leisurely section, following the ebb and flow of daily life on the family farm, the change of the seasons, and the first rumblings of the war taking place in Europe.In additon to the fine descriptions, the reader is introduced to a variety of supporting characters and all are well developed, especially Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey.

Claude is anguised by the monotony of his life and makes an effort to expand his world but is constantly thwarted.He is sent to college in Lincoln, a second rate religious institution that pales in comparison to the nearby university, but is not allowed to finish.Other disappointments follow.His marriage to the overzealous Enid Royce proves to be a disaster and his management of the family farm is far from effective.When America finally enters the war in Europe, Claude sees a way to leave the farm and his sterile existence.Cather's description of Claude's transition from civilian farmer to soldier is a little abrupt and the reader is a bit nonplused to discover that such an ineffectual person as Claude could gain a commission and make an exemplary officer.

It is with the final section, pretentiously entitled "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On", that things begin to unravel.Now Cather is on unfamiliar ground and it shows.The scenes set in France never come to life and the reader is jostled between provencial tranquility and sheer hell as the battle scenes attain a degree of ghastliness that is hyperbolic.Possibly putrefying bodies do make a sound similar to "glup, glub, glup" but this is surely a sound that Cather never heard and such descriptions just don't work.Hemingway claimed that her war scenes were faked and stolen from the battle sequences in Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and remarked, "Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere."This may be a little harsh, but points at the weakness of the novel.Ironically, Cather makes the war much more immediate and engaging when viewed fromt the plains of Nebraska.Here, German, Czech, and other European immigrants follow the war in the newspapers and battle with their own patrimony by siding with or against their new country of adoption.Cather wrote her war novel, but missed an opportunity to investigate the subject of war from this unique viewpoint, an investigation that has rarely been attempted and one that would have done much to assure the complete success of her book ... Read more

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WIlla would be proud!
As a student of literature, I found this to be an insightful and delightful investigation into the works of one of America's least understood authors.Willa Cather's works, as Middleton points out, lead directly into the Modernist genre.Jo Ann Middleton has constructed an excellent analysis of this too often overlooked American author.Drawing on Cather's uniques writing style, Middleton explains Cather's techniques and style in a manner that is beneficial for literature scholar and neophyte alike.

Landmark Work
This landmark work is an insightful and brilliant analysis of the work of Cather.Valuable for Cather fans and newbies alike! ... Read more

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In correspondence, Willa Cather confessed to planting some of her allusions deep. This reader's companion contains thousands of lively and informative entries on persons, places, and events, fictional and real, and on quotations, works of art, and other items to reveal meanings or provide background for understanding Cather's fictional world. At the same time, it offers insights into her real world and time, her interests, and her astonishingly broad frame of reference. A lifetime project of encyclopedist John March, the once unwieldy manuscript and notes have been verified, clarified, amplified, and organized by literary scholar Marilyn Arnold, with the assistance of Debra Lynn Thornton. The goal was to develop a work that would be useful to the reader while preserving March's "authorial presence" has resulted in a dictionary that will both enlighten and delight. ... Read more

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This is an extraordinary story of the friendship between Willa Cather and the author's mother, piano prodigy Yaltah Menuhin(1920-2001), sister of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. There is currently a resurgence of interest in the remarkable American author Willa Cather(1873-1947), many of whose novels explored women and creativity. This is a personal, yet universal, book which explores Cather's mentoringof the young pianist. It illuminates the lives and works of two important women artists and raises provocative questions about the effects ofsocial and family constraints on the lives of brilliant women. Against the tumultuous backdrop of America and Europe in the early andmid-20th century, Rolfe presents an engrossing chronicle of his mother’s struggle as a budding musician, her tragic relationship with herparents, and the solace she found when Cather became her mentor. The mutually inspiring friendship, which endured for decades, inspiredsome the most memorable heroines in Cather’s novels, notably Lucy Gayheart. ... Read more

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Recommended for everyone
This book is a look inside a very famous musical family, the Menuhins, and a long-term friendship between two very different women.

The Menuhin family contained three world-class musical prodigies, when most families would be happy with just one prodigy. Yehudi, the famous one, was considered the greatest musical talent of the 20th Century. Hephzibah, his sister, usually accompanied him on the piano. Then there was sister Yaltah, also a pianist. According to people who know about such things, she was the most talented of them all.

The family was run by Marutha, their mother, a cold, domineering woman. Yaltah was told, more than once, that the only reason she was alive was because of a broken diaphragm. Yaltah and Hephzibah were allowed piano lessons for the sole purpose of attracting a husband. When it came to marriage, all that mattered, according to Marutha, was whether or not he came from a well-to-do family; love was irrelevant. Yaltah's first "arranged" marriage lasted about 6 months. The family lived in Paris, because that is where the great musicians were. The rise of Hitler in the 1930s forced a move to Manhattan, where they met Willa Cather.

She was a novelist and newspaper writer from the American Midwest, who became good friends with the family and became the children's teacher (there was no regular school for the Menuhin's). Marutha kept the children out of the public eye as much as possible (their educational walks with Cather began at 6:00 AM). As the years went on, the friendship between Yaltah and Willa grew. Willa helped Yaltah deal with her mother's unfeeling personality, and Yaltah ended up inspiring several of Willa's later novels.

For Yaltah's second marriage, in the early 1940s, she eloped with an Army lawyer named Ben Rolfe. Her parents never accepted him as part of the family. The marriage ended after a number of years, partly because of his jealousy over her musical career. It was only after 2 more not-very-pleasant marriages, and her moving to London, that in the last few years of her life, she regained something like the musical career she had when she was younger.

Here is a very personal look inside a famous musical family, written by an "insider." (the author is Yaltah's son). It is very much worth reading, not just for classical music fans, or fans of 20th Century female novelists, but for everyone.

Yaltah Menuhin as Brilliant Concert Pianist
Los Angeles author Lionel Rolfe has written in The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather a moving biography of his mother Yaltah Menuhin, sister of famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and her relationship with novelist Willa Cather. Yaltah like Mendelssohn's sister Fanny and Mozart's sister Nannerl showed brilliance as a musician early but was discouraged by family members and always overshadowed by her famous brother. Rolfe looks closely at what it takes for a woman to overcome the obstacles put in front of her having a career as a touring concert pianist.

Rolfe's mother Yaltah was actively discouraged by her parents Moshe and Marutha who were Russian Jewish emigres to San Francisco where Moshe was superintendant of city's Hebrew schools. All three children of their-- Yehudi, the oldest; Hephzibah, the middle girl; and Yaltah, the youngest-were musical prodigies. At first the mother had decided the daughters wouldn't have musical careers, but then mother relented, seeing that Hephzibah could perform well in the secondary role as accompanist on the piano when her brother played his violin. The parents then that Yaltah was too "fragile" to be a touring musician.

If you compare the three Menuhin prodigies with Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn, the parallels are striking. The Mendelssohns of Hamburg, Germany, like the Menuhins of San Francisco, California, were an extremely intellectual Jewish family and both mothers were music teachers. Fanny Mendelssohn in the 1830s and Yaltah Menuhin in the 1930s had family members telling them to give up before they started.

In fact, the Menuhins were on the 20th century version of a tradition of producing prodigies going back the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Rolfe's descriptions of how the elder Menuhins educated their three children are almost a manual on how to produce prodigies.So in many ways this is a western Jewish story-how Eastern European traditions were carried on in San Francisco. Moshe was a descendant of the Lubavitch Schneersohn dynasty, one of the great Hasidic religious dynasties of Eastern Europe.Rolfe's descriptions of the Menuhins in Los Gatos, California, in the later 1930s having intrigues over who their three teenager children would be allowed to court and then marry almost sound like the intrigues of a Hassidic or European court, but music was at the center rather than religion or politics. The parents had decided that their youngest Yaltah should be married off young to a rich husband.

What's critical in his mother's life, Rolfe argues, is her relationship with this independent older woman novelist Willa Cather. Rolfe retells the fascinated story how his grandparents educated all three children at home, convincing Willa Cather to be the Shakespeare tutor for the three Menuhin children. Though the Yaltah and Willa were together only in the last decade of Cather's life, Rolfe shows this short but intense relationship was important for both.The Menuhins weren't in the Russian shtetl (village) but in the 1930s America, and Cather was no ordinary shtetl tutor.

Rolfe argues that Yaltah was the inspiration for the heroine of the novella Lucy Gayheart, which Willa Cather was writing at the same time she regularly saw the Menuhins. Further, Rolfe argues that Yaltah thought Aunt Willa was the mother that her own mother had never been. Yaltah got from Aunt Willa the image of an independent woman artist, not controlled by her parents or a husband. Indeed, Yaltah alternated between obeying her dominating parents and rebelling against them. Rolfe captures that moment when immigrant's daughters were insisting on more freedoms in America.

It does seem likely that Aunt Willa in part inspired Yaltah's rebellion. Though Yaltah at sixteen allowed her parents to pick her first husband just as Nannerl Mozart, Mozart's sister, allowed her father to pick her husband, Yaltah's first marriage only lasted six months. At twenty-one Yaltah rebelled and chose her second husband, a young Jewish soldier/lawyer.

Concerning husbands, there is another difference between Yaltah Menuhin and Fanny Mendelssohn. Fanny Mendelssohn did get the support her husband William Hensel to publish her composition and performed in the weekly family musical salons. In contrast, Yaltah Menuhin, despite lack of support from all her husbands, performed in public concerts. Though Yaltah Menuhin never had the stellar musical career of her older brother Yehudi, she did perform piano in concerts from aged 30 to 80 in North America, Europe, and England.

In Los Angeles during the 1950s where Yaltah lived with her second husband and two sons she regularly took part in the "Evenings on the Roof" series performing the work of many new composers. Again, she was a woman who stood on her own two feet like her Aunt Willa. Rolfe's book is a moving story of a fascinating woman who in order to become a musician overcomes numerous obstacles. ... Read more

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A glimpse of Cather's tastes in literature
The six essays Willa Cather gathered into this small book in 1936 give the reader a good idea of her philosophy of literature and also provide anecdotes about several literary figures she admired or met during her career. She writes about Flaubert (or, more precisely, Cather's friendship with his niece), Mrs. James T. Fields (the widow of the co-owner of the famed publisher Ticknor and Fields), Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Mann, and Katherine Mansfield. An additional piece, entitled "The Novel Demeuble" (which might be translated as "The Novel Unplugged") objects to the excesses in the fiction written by her contemporaries.

The title of the collection refers to Cather's lament that most of these writers would no longer be of interest to those then under forty years of age, and there is certainly an "old-fashioned," even prudish, stance throughout. She dismisses the realists for their "cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. . . . Have such things any proper place in imaginative art?" Although she mentions only Balzac, she clearly has in mind such American writers as Dreiser, Lewis, and Upton Sinclair.And she has no brook for Lawrence, whose characters are "dehumanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of the bodily organs under sensory stimuli." Cather didn't always feel this way; thirty-five years earlier she wrote glowingly of Frank Norris (in an essay not included here), praising the descriptions of workaday environment in "McTeague" as "convincingproof of power, imagination and literary skill." Apparently, Cather eventually believed that the scales tipped too far toward realism--or her tastes simply changed.

The most interesting, and breeziest, piece concerns Madame Grout, who was Flaubert's niece and lifelong correspondent (the "Caro" in his "Letters to My Niece Caroline"); Cather manages simultaneously to provide a touching account of this aging lady and to instill an increased appreciation of Flaubert's achievement. Probably the key to understanding Cather's work is her ode to Jewett, to whom she was much indebted and whose work she championed to the reading public throughout her life. The weakest essay, it must be noted, is Cather's review of Thomas Mann's "Joseph" novels. She did not live to see the fourth book published, so the essay was premature, and her judgment that these books were Mann's greatest is hard to support. (Dare I say that it would be far more fascinating to know what she thought of "Death in Venice"?) Even here, however, she captures Mann's essence--his "rich deliberateness which is never without intensity and deep vibration." All the essays, then, will provide Cather fans with a glimpse of the art underlying the fiction she herself published in the late 1920s and the 1930s--from "Death Comes for the Archbishop" to "Lucy Gayheart."

Cather's essays are as sublime as her novels
William Gass recently observed that participants in contemporary writing workshops are not interested in literature.They are interested in writing, in "expressing a self as shallow as a saucer."WillaCather was interested in literature, in art, in permanence, and the essaysin Not Under Forty memorably illustrate her beliefs.Her seriousness andintegrity are very much needed in an era when acclaimed young novelists usetheir acknowledgements to thank Mom for reading their manuscripts andcorrecting their punctuation. ... Read more

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First published in 1923, A Lost Lady is one of Willa Cather’s classic novels about life on the Great Plains. It harks back to Nebraska’s early history and contrasts those days with an unsentimental portrait of the materialistic world that supplanted the frontier. In her subtle portrait of Marian Forrester, whose life unfolds in the midst of this disquieting transition, Cather created one of her most memorable and finely drawn characters.

This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of A Lost Lady is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. The historical essay describes the origin, writing, and reception of the novel as well as motion pictures that were later based on it; and a selection of archival photographs illuminates the connection between the novel and the people and places from Cather’s formative years in Nebraska. Explanatory notes identify locations, literary references, persons, events, and specialized terminology. The textual essays describe the production and subsequent revisions of the text.

Susan J. Rosowski is Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and the series editor for Cather Studies. Kari A. Ronning is assistant editor of the Cather Scholarly Edition. Charles W. Mignon and Frederick M. Link are professors emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska. ... Read more

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LOST TO POSTERITY...
This is a simply written but thematically complex, metaphoric story, replete with subtle nuances. The events that transpire are seen primarily through the eyes of a boy who comes of age, a contrivance that the author successfully employed in her best selling classic, "My Antonia". Here, it is no less successful. Through the eyes of Neil Herbert, who lives in Sweet Water, a prospective railroad hub on the Western plains in one of the prairie states, the reader gets to know Marian Forrester. She is the much younger, envied wife of one of the town's more prominent and wealthier citizens, Captain Daniel Forrester, a former railroad contractor.

As Neil grows into a man, his adoration of the lovely Mrs. Forrester undergoes a change. He sees her fall from the pedestal from where he and all the townspeople have placed her and sees her, really sees her, warts and all, for the first time, when he discovers her involved in an unexpected peccadillo. It comes as a shock to him that she may not be all that she seems to be. Still, his life is closely entwined with hers, as his uncle, with whom he lives, is Captain Forrester's personal attorney and of the same social standing in this socially circumscribed backwater.

Just as Neil's perception of Mrs. Forrester begins to change in his eyes, so do the fortunes of the town and that of Captain Forrester. As Mrs. Forrester physically deteriorates under the strain of the vicissitudes of fate, so do the town and its surrounding environs. As she revives, leaving behind her old values and adopting new ones that are anathema to those who respect the traditional ones, her revival parallels changes in the town itself, as the old makes way for the new. These changes also parallel the shifts occurring on the American frontier, as social mores and personal values undergo a change, and those stalwart pioneer values give way to new ones.

Beautifully descriptive of a bygone era and laconic in its pace, this is most certainly a novel to be savored. Fans of the author will especially enjoy it. ... Read more

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This rich selection of Willa Cather's short fiction is drawn from every period of her writing life, and mixes the little known with the much anthologised. Here we have a range of stories from short, vivid sketches to novellas. They tell of the bitter lives of Nebraskan immigrants, and of the pull between provincial America and the cosmopolitan world of art; some of the most poignant deal with the challenges and dilemmas for the American artist. Her marvellous late stories are charged with beautifully controlled feeling, and eloquently describe the tensions and complications of family life. Cather also let herself go in these stories in ways she did not in the longer fiction, with harsh satires of New York, chilling glimpses of the supernatural, and strong expressions of sexual feeling. These are stories that add immeasurably to our perception of Cather's range and complexity. ... Read more

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