Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World

by Janis P. Stout

Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.

Genres: Biography

381 pages, Hardcover

First published December 29, 2000

About the author

Janis P. Stout is Professor Emerita and former Dean of Faculties at Texas A&M University. A versatile writer of both fiction and scholarship, she has published numerous novels and influential literary studies, including Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Her work frequently explores journey narratives, women’s writing, and the lives of authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Jane Austen.

Reviews

[Alex Myers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps my reaction to this book comes from the fact that I was looking for more of a biography of the writer (and a consideration of her literary impact). This volume provided more analysis of her writing than of her life, by far. Though it was quite readable and interesting, I finished it feeling that I needed to find another biography to actually be informed about her character and experiences.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thesis research! A wonderful, interesting, and very readable overview of Cather and her writing. Stout effortlessly blends biography with literary criticism to produce a fascinating portrait of this great 20th century author.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always interesting to compare two different biographies of a person, one written by someone who knew them and one written many decades after their death. While Stout's biography does try to mitigate some of the aggressive leaping to conclusions that other Cather scholars have participated in, there is still an almost obsessive focus on IDENTITY. Does Cather's teenage choice of masculinized clothing mean something about her IDENTITY? Do her female relationships say something about her IDENTITY? It's such a 21st century obsession that I hadn't realized, until I read a biography of Cather written by a contemporary, how refreshing it was to avoid all that.

Stout's book is an interesting one, and I would have finished it if I wasn't already rolling into a Fitzgerald biography, but I feel, for all his research and care, I have a much clear idea of who Cather was from reading Edith Lewis's much shorter book.

[Donna]

My reasoning in wanting to read Willa Cather's books is because she lived near by mother's childhood home. Mom often talked of the author, her works and encouraged me to read more. I never did. Perhaps now in my retirement years, I will learn to appreciate reading. I would like to find a copy of The Bohemian Girl by Cather.