Word: willa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is a cold, autumnal book. The question is never deemed worth asking, whether this life was worth living. There is nothing here of the noble Willa Gather nostalgia for a Nebraska full of giants, or the facile Hemingway nostalgia for a Michigan of pliant girls and truly good trout. By the time Floyd is murdered for his watch, he has swollen into a huge and lonely figure. His death can stand for that of the white man's America, or of the whole human race. He never has had much use for that latter one anyway...
...Willa Gather a "minor writer" [Aug. 13]? Unequivocally this places the reviewer, Martha Duffy, in the category of "lost lady": she has befuddled her thinking with today's hollow tomes. Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop has been one of America's most enduring classics...
...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...
...When Willa was eight, her family moved from Virginia to Nebraska. She considered those early years in the newly settled state the most important of her life. In 1880, Nebraska was still a pioneer society. Most people lived in sod houses. So many settlers from Scandinavia and Bohemia were arriving that Willa could go for days without hearing English spoken outside her house. She was wildly excited. To her, the 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...