Word: cather
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...LOST LADY by WILLA CATHER 177 pages. Knopf...
...Willa Cather was born 100 years ago. This novel, reissued in a handsome centenary edition, first appeared in 1923 when the author was 50 and doing her best work. H.L. Mencken had called her a great novelist. Edmund Wilson, a young whippersnapper in those days, conceded that she was one of the few who could bring "distinction" to the Middle West: "that meager and sprawling scene." Not even he was aware that at that very moment the post-World War I generation-Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner-were sealing the door on Cather's kind of reverent regionalism...
Today, like Ellen Glasgow and Sherwood Anderson, Cather has her own persistent following. In addition, students are still required to read the chaste historical novels Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock in high school English classes. Many sound things can be learned from Cather. Her writing was almost always serene and poised, and she had the ability-which perhaps cannot be taught-of making her prose move as fast as the action she was describing...
...prairie grass looked as if it were running; it seemed possible to hear the corn growing in the summer night. In the next eleven years, the frontier was to vanish. "The great-hearted adventurers" who opened the West were replaced by men "trained in petty economies." When Cather began to write, it was already with powerful nostalgia...
...rigorously simple and familiar saga, The Emigrants is made eloquent through the tone and the telling. Director Jan Troell gives life and substance to what Willa Cather called "the precious, the incommunicable past." Indeed, at its best, The Emigrants has the same feeling for landscape and incident (a man proud of a pair of new black boots, a death and burial at sea) that glistens in Cather's best work...