Word: willa
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...does not sound very promising, perhaps. But Authoress Cather is better than her implicit word: if she does not hold you breathless, she never lets you nod. And when you have finished her unspectacular narrative you may be somewhat surprised to realize that you have been living human history. Willa Cather's Northeast passages are never purple. Captious critics might complain that she sometimes simplifies too far, that her people are sometimes so one-sided as to be simply silly, that she sometimes, for one who can write like an angel, gives a fair imitation of poor Poll: "When...
...quotation, often unjust, cannot do Willa Cather justice. Her manner of writing has little in common with her noisy day. Characterized by an English critic as "that rara avis, an autochthonous American author," she is most conveniently classified by negatives. Says the same critic: "The King Charles's head of psychoanalysis and experiment in genre does not keep continually turning up in her books as they do [sic] in those rather Mr. Dick-like compositions of Mr. Sherwood Anderson for instance." Unlike Sinclair Lewis, she does not bite her country's hand; unlike Edith Wharton (whose example influenced...
...Author. Willa Sibert Cather looks and talks like a kindly, sensible Middle-Western housewife, stout, low-heeled, good at marketing and mending. Her motherly hats are fluttered by no mercurial wings. A spinster, there is nothing old maidish about her comfortable appearance; only her keen blue eyes belie her look of somewhat stolid placidity. Though you would never guess it from her voice she comes from Virginia, but her father moved the family to a Nebraska ranch, near Red Cloud, when she was eight. Instead of going to school she rode her pony around the country, getting acquainted with...
...Willa Cather's two grandmothers, to whom she read aloud from English classics, and a storekeeping uncle who, an Oxford graduate, taught her Latin, were important aids to her education. Her first writing was for the Lincoln State Journal. After she was graduated from the University of Nebraska, Willa Cather went to Pittsburgh, became dramatic critic on the Leader. Then she tried teaching English at the Allegheny High School, wrote verse in off-hours, published a book of it (April Twilights) in 1903. Famed Editor Samuel Sidney McClure, to whom she sent her first stories, published them, gave...
...Eugene O'Neill had received it. . . . I'd have felt the same way about Ernest Hemingway. He'll get it some day, but I suppose he hasn't written enough yet. I think Hemingway will get the award in ten years. Then there is Willa Cather. No one writes better...