Word: willa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Katherine Anne Porter is praising the short stories of Willa Gather, but the lines could be used without revision to describe some of her own small classics. Noon Wine (1937), a short novel, recounts a stark frontier tragedy of murder and remorse as muted and inevitable as anything by Thomas Hardy. Another flawless short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), describes the descent of a consciousness toward death-and its reluctant return to life -with mesmeric power...
...often locked in a wintry cold, but even in summer the sun seldom shines full strength on the lonely fishermen, hired men and country women who inhabit it. They are stolid, they endure, but they are closer to Hawthorne's withdrawn New Englanders or the overworked pioneers of Willa Cather's Midwest than to the comfortable, free-living suburbanites of today's affluent society. Perhaps they recall, to Presidents as well as to ordinary people, the bitter hard work that went into making a nation...