Bernice Slote - Böcker

More than 100 pieces in this surprising and impressive collection are drawn from a body of Willa Cather’s writing that was not known to exist until its recent discovery by the editor. Previous scholars have assumed that Willa Cather was inactive as a journalist during the year following her graduation from the university in June, 1895; the truth is, she not only continued to contribute drama criticism to Lincoln newspapers, but also, in Miss Slote’s words, had time to “consider thoughtfully and work out some of the guiding principles of fiction, the certain range in the Kingdom of Art which was becoming . . . her own.”Miss Slote has focused on those of the 1893-1896 writings in which Willa Cather formulates and tests her critical attitudes, and on those-even more crucially relevant to her own situation-in which she asks the great questions: What makes an artist? How does one join the two selves of artist and person? Exactly how can one create the creation? Part I presents two essays by the editor: “Writer in Nebraska,” incorporating new biographical material, and “The Kingdom of Art,” a critical reassessment in the light of new findings. Part II consists of some 220 selections accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, grouped as follows: “The Individual Talent”-observations on artists who lives evoked Willa Cather’s sympathy, wonder, or respect, and who success or failure seemed to embody the principles of human endeavor; “The Way of the World”-on art in Philistia, the relations of things (e.g., poetry and football), and history in the arts; “Drama”-pieces on the playwright and his craft and the critic’s responsibilities, as well as lay reviews; “Literature”-major essays on Stevenson, Dumas, Poe, Wilde, Verlaine, Ruskin, and Pierre Loti, and shorter pieces on such writers as Hardy, James, Swinburne, Kipling, Burns, Zola, Tolstoi, and Whitman; and “Improvisations Toward a Credo, 1894-1896”-culminating in two statements in which as last, as the editor notes, “Willa Cather could recognize clearly the emerging form of the artist-self she had been seeking, and with it the individual talent in which all credos must begin.”

Before she wrote her prose masterpieces, Willa Cather produced striking poems, which were collected in 1903 in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers! by nine years. In her introduction, distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this early edition of April Twilights restores what had been "an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist." Among the thirty-seven selections are the much-anthologized "Grandmither, Think Not I Forget," and the highly evocative "Prairie Dawn."

Thirteen of the essays in this volume were selected from sixty-one papers delivered at the 1962 joint meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Central Renaissance Conference. Two essays, "The Road of Excess" by Northrop Frye and "King Lear as Metaphor" by L. C. Knights, were originally presented as major lectures during the conference, whose central theme was criticism in relation to myth and symbol. Edited with a foreword by Bernice Slote, this book, as Miss Slote writes, is "an experiment in criticism: by repeated views from somewhat different vantage points, the essays present definitions and illustrate forms of a comparatively new way of considering literature—a concentration on myth and symbol."

The seven stories in this volume were written during the ascending and perhaps most triumphant years of Willa Cather's career, the period during which she published nine books, including My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are, as Bernice Slote observes, bound by the geometrics of urban life-streets and offices, workers and firms, the business world of New York and Pittsburgh, the cities which by 1929 Willa Cather had known well for over thirty years." In her introduction, Slote discusses their biographical elements, connections with earlier and later work, and the intricate patterns that lie below the lucid, shimmering surface of Willa Cather's prose.