Dee Speed Speed itibaren Sandoval County, NM, Birleşik Devletler
I am a huge fan of the severely underappreciated author Willa Cather (1873-1947), which motivated me to read this biography. I learned a lot of truly engaging stuff about this writer I love, I came to understand her better, and I even learned a few facts and details I’m not sure anyone would ever need (this all may just be the mark of a very thorough biography). Recently, I read this biography a second time. Cather is a supremely fascinating person to study, because she represents such an interesting dichotomy. She was a closeted lesbian who wrote simple and elegant best seller and prize-winning novels about the common people of the Midwest and Old West (O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, Song of the Lark, My Mortal Enemy, A Lost Lady, Death Comes for the Archbishop, One of Ours). Even while living with other women, Cather was also a social conservative. Her stories focused on a culture of people who were often would be harshest judges of her lesbianism if they’d known; Cather praised them as she tried to hide her own relationships from them. Her writing style is mostly clean and even stark, with only occasional florid forays into clumsy romance and melodrama. Cather’s style of “folk” writing wasn’t always critically popular in her time, and her old-fashioned morality tales would often seem at conflict with her sexuality. Cather mostly grew up in tiny Red Cloud, Nebraska (out in the middle of nowhere, close to the Nebraska-Kansas border) in the late 1800s. She hated it – its ruralism, its Puritanism. She always wanted out. In 1889, Cather insisted on college, which her family had to mortgage their farm to send her to. She graduated the University of Nebraska and then moved to Pittsburgh for a while, and then – after she took over the editorship of McClure’s (which was the literary magazine of its time), she moved to New York City. As a female editor of a national magazine in the 1910s, she was an extreme rarity – a model of early feminist executive power. In college, Cather often dressed in men’s clothing and insisted on being called “William” (in Nebraska!?!? In the 1890s?!?!?) However in time, she even learned to subjugate this tom-boyishness. Because of the time she was raised in, she hid her lesbianism all her life. Cather herself destroyed many personal writings and insisted the ones she kept not be quoted for 100 years after her 1947 death. Cather only became a famous writer when she started writing about the life in pioneer Nebraska – the one she earlier said she loathed. She had one novel before – a tepid Henry James knockoff called Alexander’s Bridge (only read it if you’re obsessed with her!) For her second novel, Cather went back to the life she had once said she hated – first with O Pioneers! in 1913 – and she found the voice that led her to fans, praise and success. Slowly, Cather came to laud the people she once disparaged, both in her fiction and in her public talks. This same pastoral writing is what made many critics dismiss her for the last 20 years of her life. She did write about the Old West, and a couple of her novels dealt with artists – mostly singers (Cather was obsessed with opera and its leading ladies). Mostly, thought, Cather’s prosaic stories of pioneer life are also highlighted by the occasional but dramatic adult subjects of suicide, sexual awakening, adultery, envy, irreconcilable differences and even murder (each event in her fictional work almost always based on things that DID happen in her small town as Cather grew up). My favorite book by Cather is My Ántonia (I’ve even adapted it to stage), a story of a pioneer boy who falls in love with a local immigrant girl in the 1880s. Both of Cather’s characters’ lives are marked by a family suicide. Cather wrote the entire novel from a male perspective, having the boy Jim Burden tell the entire story, which was not unheard of but unusual for a female author of her time. I always feel a kinship with Cather, because she and I were both raised in the small-town Midwest, we’re both homosexual, we both fled our conservative upbringings, and we’ve been personally touched by the same tragedies that Cather writes about in her novels. I’ve read most of her works, some several times. This biography about Cather is very thorough and mostly readable. It’s obvious author Phyllis C. Robinson is more obsessed with Cather than even I am; she uncovers every fact possible, even after Cather’s letters were destroyed. Because this biography was written in 1983, Robinson introduces Cather’s sexuality slowly and with much proof; at first, her approach seems to comically skate the subject, but by the end, Robinson hides nothing and uses her facts to provide some deep insight into Cather and her ability as a writer. At times, Robinson clutters up her own writing with too many names, dates, and facts, but there is no question this was thoroughly researched and carefully constructed, especially for an audience of Midwesterners who, in 1983, didn’t want their favorite author’s reputation “maligned” with accusations of lesbianism. In many ways, the full picture Robinson provides – of Cather and her environment – makes Cather’s life and even her writing, her talent and her approach, make so much more sense. Despite often being dismissed by critics, several people of her time did appreciate Cather. She won a Pulitzer (a rarity for women) for her novel One of Ours – which conservatively praised what military service could do to give aimless youth direction in life. (I know! It’d never fly today… I personally thought it was beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time; I love how Cather created a fictional story that exemplified this.) The critic H.L. Mencken always roundly praised Cather, dismissing the more popular Laura Ingals Wilders as “Cather for lazy, unimaginative people.” And when Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said he felt Cather should have won it. In Robinson’s biography, Cather’s talent was years ahead of her time. Cather’s worldview, however, makes perfect sense for a closeted lesbian and a woman raised in 19th-century pioneer Nebraska with all of its requisite conservatism and moralizing. Despite a glut of data, this complete picture is what has always fascinated me about Cather, and it’s what Robinson presents in its purest form in this biography.
Useful, brief little book on biblical scholarship methods. Direct, easy to grasp.
Amazing story! Nuff said. I don't re-read books. As a matter of fact, I don't think I have ever read a book twice. I WILL read this book again, and I might even read it a third time somewhere down the line. Very inspiring. Full of determination and courage. I loved it!