Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are pulling
a specific thread that I think a lot of us might
have touched on in high school English class,
maybe briefly, but we probably didn't realize
just how much tension was holding that thread
together. We're talking about Willa Cather. Willa
Cather, yeah. It is a name that for a lot of
people conjures up a very specific, almost...
dusty set of images. Dusty is a good word for
it. Right. You think of swaying wheat fields,
sunsets on the prairie, maybe a sense of quiet
pioneer resilience. You might picture a woman
in a long skirt looking wistfully at a plow.
But if you actually dig into the source material,
as we were going to do today, that quiet image
gets very loud very quickly. Exactly. I think
most people file her under classic author, put
her on the shelf next to maybe Steinbeck or Laura
Ingalls Wilder, who she's nothing like. the way
and then just move on not at all like them no
But looking at the stack of research we have
here, I mean, we have biographies, we have letters
that were hidden for decades, literary criticism
ranging from the 1920s all the way to modern
gender studies. Cather isn't just a writer of
nice country stories. She is, and I don't think
this is an overstatement, basically the architect
of the American Midwestern identity. That is
a very strong way to put it, and it's an accurate
one. I mean, before Cather, the Midwest in literature
was, well, it was largely seen as a cultural
wasteland. or, you know, just a place you pass
through to get to the gold rush. A flyover state
before we had planes. Exactly. She was the one
who turned it into a mythological landscape.
She gave it a soul. And the kicker, she wasn't
even a native Midwesterner. She was a transplant.
Yet she is the one who defined how the entire
world sees the Great Plains. So our mission today
is to really unpack the life of this woman who
somehow managed to bridge the gap between the
wild rough and tumble frontier and high sophisticated
literary art. And she did all of that. While
fiercely guarding a private life, that scholars
are still, I mean, they are still fighting about
it today. There is so much mystery there. She
burned her letters. She tried to erase her tracks.
Oh, we've got it all today. We have got the tension
between, you know, what we think of as nostalgia
versus the brutal reality. We've got this recurring
theme of exile, which makes so much sense once
we get into her backstory. And we have a feud.
I love a good literary feud. Oh, it's a great
one. We're going to get to the aha moment where
a Pulitzer Prize winner, Cather, gets accused
of plagiarizing a war movie by none other than
Ernest Hemingway. And that's such a fascinating
conflict because it really exposes the shift
in how Americans viewed war and reality itself
in the 1920s. It wasn't just a petty squabble.
It was, you could argue, a battle for the soul
of American literature. Wow. But we're getting
a little ahead of ourselves. Right, right. Let's
rewind. Let's go all the way back to the beginning.
Because to understand the prairie she wrote about,
you have to understand where she came from first.
Section one, the transplanted child. To really
get Cather, you have to understand the shock
of her childhood. She was not born in a sod house
on the prairie. She was born in 1873 in the Bat
Creek Valley of Virginia. OK, so paint the picture
for me, because when I think of 1870s Virginia,
I'm thinking post -Civil War, but still very,
very settled, lush, green. Exactly. Think rolling
hills, sheep grazing, a deep sense of history.
Her family, the Cathers, had been there for a
long time. They lived in a large Greek revival
style home called Willow Shade. It was a very
settled, very structured existence. You had fences.
You had distinct roads. You had a sense of enclosure
and safety. A known world. A completely known
world. But in 1883, when Willa is just nine years
old, everything changes. Her family decides to
pack up and move to Webster County, Nebraska.
Okay, stop. Why Nebraska? That seems like a massive
and frankly dangerous jump in the 1880s. I mean,
that's barely a decade after the area was really
opened up for homesteading. Well, it was part
of a trend. Her grandparents had actually moved
out there a bit earlier seeking farmland. The
soil in Virginia was getting exhausted and there
was this promise of, you know, endless fertile
land out west. There was also a desire to escape
tuberculosis outbreaks, which were a real problem
in Virginia at the time. So it's a mix of hope
and fear driving them. Right. But for a nine
year old girl. This wasn't an adventure. The
way she later described it, it was an erasure.
An erasure. That is a really heavy word for a
moving day. Think about the sensory details.
You are moving from the enclosed, green, rolling,
very human -scale hills of Virginia to the Great
Plains. In Cather's own writings and biographies,
this transition is described as a genuine trauma.
The prairie was vast, empty, and terrifyingly
open. I was trying to picture it. There were
no trees, right? Literally. Almost no trees.
trees, no hills to hide behind, just the wind
which never stopped, and the grass, a sea of
grass. She said later that she felt like she
had been dropped at the end of the world. I can
absolutely see that. It's like moving from a
cozy, cluttered Victorian room to the surface
of Mars. The scale of it must have been psychologically
crushing. Precisely. And she famously said that
the land itself seemed to want to swallow her
up. She felt that there was, and this is her
quote, nothing to hold on to and this is where
we see the seed of that exile theme you mentioned
at the top she was a transplant she didn't belong
to land initially the land was this dynamic overwhelming
presence that she had to wrestle with it wasn't
just scenery for her oh no for cather the landscape
was a character and it was a character that could
either crush you or make you so The family gets
there. I'm assuming they tried to farm. That
was the whole point of moving. They did. Her
father, Charles Cather, he tried his hand at
farming for about 18 months. But frankly, he
was a gentleman farmer from Virginia. He wasn't
cut out for the brutal physical labor of breaking
sod in Nebraska. It just didn't stick. So what
did they do? They eventually gave up on the farmstead
and moved into the nearby town of Red Cloud,
Nebraska. Okay, Red Cloud. Now this is a name
that comes up again and again. This becomes the
setting. or the inspiration for the setting of
almost all her famous books, right? It does.
It becomes Black Hawk in My Antonia or Sweetwater
in A Lost Lady. Red Cloud is The Crucible. And
Living in Red Cloud is where the young Willa
Cather really starts to forge her identity. And
this is the part of the story that, when I first
read it, just completely contradicted that prairie
schoolmarm image. Oh, absolutely. We are now
entering what I call the William phase. Yes,
the William phase. so crucial to understanding
her living in red cloud cather did not exactly
conform to the victorian standards for young
ladies not even a little bit not at all around
age 13 to 14 she starts cutting her hair short
very short like a boy's crop which was scandalous
in the 1880s she started dressing in masculine
clothing starched shirts ties and she actually
signed her name as william in her books and even
on official documents she could get her hands
on william not will it not even will william
william and sometimes get this william Cather,
MD. Because she wasn't just playing dress -up.
She was incredibly ambitious and scientifically
minded. She was making house calls with a local
physician in Red Cloud, a Dr. Damarel. Wait,
hold on, pause. She was doing medical rounds.
As a teenager. Yeah. The teenage girl in the
1880s is going out on house calls. She was. She
was fascinated by science. Her actual plan was
to become a surgeon. She had access to a fantastic
library owned by a Jewish couple in town, the
Wieners, and she was reading everything anatomy,
physiology. She was dissecting frogs in her attic.
She was observing the harsh realities of the
body birth, death, disease. That is so incredibly
far from the image of the lady writer contemplating
sunsets. She's dissecting frogs and going by
William. What's the learner's takeaway here?
Is this just a tomboy phase or is something much
deeper happening? It is so much deeper. I think
the takeaway is that she wasn't a passive observer
of the frontier. She was actively pushing against
every boundary she could find, gender boundaries,
professional boundaries. She was looking at the
world with a clinical, analytical eye. It almost
feels like a survival strategy. Like she's trying
to find a way to have agency in a world that
gives her very little. I think that's exactly
it. In that era, who had the power? Who had the
freedom to move, to study, to cut, to cure, to
travel? Men. So if you're a brilliant young girl
who wants to be a surgeon, maybe you feel you
have to be William to even imagine that future
for yourself. And does this connect to her writing
later on, that William persona? Oh, directly.
It absolutely connects. That persona links to
the scholarly debates today about her sexual
identity, which we will definitely get to. But
it also directly informs... forms her narrative
voice. How so? In her most famous books, she
often writes from a male perspective. Jim Burden
in My Antonia is the narrator. He's a man looking
back, telling the story of a woman. Catherine
was comfortable in that masculine space because
she had lived in it in a way during her most
formative years. It was a lens she knew how to
use. So she has this intense scientific ambition.
She wants to be a doctor. She's hacking up frogs.
But obviously, she doesn't stay in Red Cloud
forever. No, she outgrows it pretty quickly.
She's destined for bigger things. In 1890, she
heads off to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Which brings us perfectly into section two, the
hustle. Because the pivot from William the Surgeon
to Will the Writer happens here. And it happens
incredibly fast. It does. I mean, she enrolls
in 1890 still with the full intention of being
a woman of science. But then she writes an essay
for an English class. It was an assignment on
Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher. Just
a standard homework assignment. Nothing special.
Supposedly. But her professor was so impressed
by it that without telling her, he submitted
it to the Nebraska State Journal and they published
it. Imagine opening the newspaper and seeing
your homework, your thoughts printed for everyone
to see. That must have been a rush. It was a
massive rush. She described seeing her words
in print as having a hypnotic effect. It was
addictive. She later said the ink was the hook.
That was the precise moment science lost her
and literature gained her. She realized she had
a voice and more importantly that people wanted
to read it. And. She did not waste any time.
She started grinding. This wasn't someone who
sat around waiting for inspiration to strike.
She was an absolute workhorse. She immediately
became a regular contributor to the journal.
She was also the main editor of the university
student newspaper, The Hesperian. And she was
writing columns for $1 a pop. $1? You have to
write a lot of columns to pay the rent at that
rate. Even back then. Oh, she was prolific. She
was reviewing plays, writing opinion pieces,
really sharpening her skills. And she became
known as a meat cleaver critic. She was vicious.
If a touring theater company came through Lincoln
and the lead actress was bad, Willa Cather would
absolutely destroy her in the morning paper.
I love that. The meat tax of Lincoln. That's
a great nickname. She did not pull her punches.
But before we leave her university years. There's
a fun fact in our notes that I honestly thought
was a typo when I first read it. It sounds like
a typo, but it is 100 % real. While she was at
the university, she was taking math classes.
And who was her math teacher? A young lieutenant
who was stationed there as a military instructor.
His name was John J. Pershing. John J. Pershing?
Yes. As in Black Jack Pershing, the guy who would
go on to lead the American Expeditionary Forces
in World War I. The very same. Before he was
a general of the armies, he was a ROTC instructor
and math teacher at the University of Nebraska.
That is just wild. So you have Willa Cather,
future literary giant, sitting in a classroom
learning algebra from Black Jack Pershing, future
military giant. Did they get along? Surprisingly,
yes. He was known for being incredibly strict,
a real taskmaster, but Cather respected him.
And here's an even crazier detail. Both of them
would go on to win Pulitzer Prizes. No way. Yes.
Pershing won for history, for his memoirs, and
Cather, of course, for fiction. It's a small
world in Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1890s. So she
graduates. She has the writing bug. Bad. But
to become the voice of the Midwest, she actually
has to leave the Midwest, right? That seems to
be the paradox. It's the great paradox of so
many regional writers. To see the prairie clearly,
she had to get some distance. So in 1896, she
makes her next big move. She goes to Pittsburgh
to work for a women's magazine called Home Monthly.
I feel like every writer has this phase in their
biography. I need a job, so I'll edit a terrible
magazine phase. It was a grueling phase for her.
She was working as a telegraph editor, a drama
critic. And on top of that, she was teaching
high school Latin and algebra just to make ends
meet. She spent 10 years in Pittsburgh. It was
her apprenticeship, her wilderness years in a
way. And then eventually she gets the call to
the big leagues. New York City. New York, 1906.
She joins McClure's magazine. Now, for you listening,
we really need to explain what McClure's was.
This wasn't just some glossy magazine. In 1906,
this was the headquarters of muckraking. Right,
muckraking. It sounds dirty, but it was actually
some of the most high -impact journalism of the
era. Think of it as the WikiLeaks or the Twitter
files of the early 1900s. These were journalists
doing deep dive investigations. They were exposing
corruption in Standard Oil, corruption in local
governments, labor abuses. It was a high -pressure,
fact -obsessed environment. And Cather was hired
as a managing editor and writer right in the
thick of it. But this is where we stumble onto
a scandal, or I guess a secret that was kept
for a very, very long time. The Mary Baker Eddy
story. This one plays out like a conspiracy theory.
This is such a fascinating detour in her career.
So McClure's wanted to publish a massive expose
on Mary Baker Eddy, who was the founder of Christian
Science. And Christian Science was a major powerful
force back then. Massive and very wealthy and
very, very litigious. They protected their image
fiercely. Now, the project was officially credited
to a freelance journalist named Georgine Milmean.
Milmean had done a ton of research. I mean, a
mountain of it. She gathered all the data, court
records, affidavits, but she couldn't pull the
narrative together. So she was a researcher,
not a writer. Exactly. She was a collector. The
manuscript was apparently a complete mess. So
McClure's is sitting on this pile of dynamite
evidence, but they can't publish it because it
reads like a phone book. So they call in the
closer. They bring in Willa Cather. That's right.
She spent a full year in Boston basically ghostwriting
this entire massive biography. She verified all
the facts, she organized the timeline, and she
turned this raw data into a compelling, driving
narrative. She made it a story. But here's the
twist. When it was published, serialized over
18 months in the magazine, a huge deal whose
name was on it. Georgene Milne. Only Georgene
Milne. So Cather does the heavy lifting, writes
what we now know was 12 of the 14 parts, and
gets zero public credit for it. Zero. Not a byline,
not a mention. It was a ghostwriting gig from
hell. It wasn't until 1993, I mean decades after
everyone involved was dead, that a letter was
discovered in the Christian Science Church archives
that finally confirmed Cather wrote the vast
majority of it. Why did she do it? Was it just
for the paycheck? Or the experience? Well, it
was the job. She was an editor at McCores. This
was her assignment. But it taught her something
crucial. It taught her how to handle massive
amounts of research and structure, a long -form
narrative. But it also completely burned her
out. She was tired of journalism. She was tired
of facts for facts' sake. She was tired of writing
in other people's voices. So she has the skills.
She has the work ethic. She's a machine. But
there's no soul in her own writing yet. Correct.
And that brings us to the most important meeting
of her professional life, the mentor. She meets
the writer Sarah Ornjot. Sarah Orne Jewett, for
those who might not know, she was a very big
deal in New England literature at the time, right?
A huge deal. She was the master of what they
called local color. She wrote these beautiful,
subtle stories about Maine, the fishermen, the
fading villages. She was older, established,
and she took Cather under her wing. And she gave
her a piece of advice that basically saved Willa
Cather from being a mediocre Henry James copycat.
I have the gist of the advice here in the notes.
She basically told Cather to stop masquerading.
Exactly. Catter had been trying to write these
stories that imitated the styles of popular male
authors, especially Henry James. Very sophisticated,
very psychological, often set in drawing rooms
in London or New York. Jute read them and said,
essentially, you are pretending. This isn't you.
You are writing from the outside in. You need
to write about your own country. Write about
your own country. And that meant Nebraska. It
meant Nebraska. It meant the immigrants. It meant
the wind and the grass. Gia gave her permission
to believe that the wild, uncultured Midwest
was a subject worthy of high art. She told her,
and this is another great quote, the thing that
teases the mind over and over again is the only
thing worth writing about. For Cather, that thing
was the prairie. And that one piece of advice
directly birthed the Prairie Trilogy, which takes
us perfectly into Section 3. This is where Willa
Cather... becomes cather this is the breakthrough
oh pioneers in 1913 the song of the lark in 1915
and the big one my antonia in 1918 these three
books back to back define the genre okay let's
really dig into this because i want to list the
titles what made these books so radically different
because plenty of people were writing westerns
back then Yeah, the cowboys, the shootouts, the
whole Zane Gray sort of thing. Cather wasn't
interested in cowboys, not at all. She wasn't
interested in gunfights or gold rushes. She was
interested in the farmers, the people who actually
did the work of staying alive on the land. And
specifically, she was interested in the immigrants.
This is a critical distinction that we often
miss today when we look back. Right, because
today we think of Nebraska as this sort of homogenous
heartland. But back then, it was a tower of Babel
on the prairie. It was a melting pot on the plains.
Katar was fascinated by these diverse cultures
she grew up with. In Red Cloud, she had neighbors
who were Bohemian, which is modern -day Czech,
Scandinavian, German, French -Canadian. They
all spoke different languages. They ate different
foods. They had different religions and customs.
Let's take My Antonia, for example. The title
character, Antonia Shmurda, isn't a generic pioneer
woman. She is specifically Bohemian. She is.
And she's based on Cather's real -life childhood
friend, a woman named Annie Sadelec Pavelka.
And what Cather did that was so revolutionary
was to give these immigrants a dignity that was
incredibly rare in literature at the time. Can
you expand on that? What was the usual depiction?
Well, you have to remember the early 20th century
in America was rife with xenophobia. There was
a strong nativist movement. Immigrants from Eastern
and Southern Europe were often portrayed as caricatures
or as dirty or as un -American or as threats
to the national identity. And Cather just flips
that entire script. She makes Antonia the symbol
of vitality and strength and endurance. Susan
J. Rosowski, who was a prominent Cather scholar,
argued that Cather was perhaps the first major
American... author to grant immigrants a truly
respectable position in our literature. She didn't
erase their language or their customs to make
them more palatable. She celebrated them. Their
foreignness was part of their strength. But she
doesn't romanticize it. She doesn't shy away
from the incredible hardship of their lives.
I remember reading my Antonia in school and being
absolutely struck by the suicide of Mr. Shmurda.
That is a pivotal scene, and it's based on a
real event from her childhood. Mr. Shmurda, the
father, is a cultivated man from the old country.
He plays the violin. He's sensitive. And he simply
cannot handle the harshness, the silence, the
crushing cold and emptiness of Nebraska. He shoots
himself. in the way she describes the aftermath.
It's heartbreaking. The family is unable to bury
him in the Catholic cemetery because he's a suicide,
so they have to bury him at the corner of their
property at the crossroads. And that lonely grave
at the crossroads becomes this powerful symbol.
She shows the incredible cost of the American
dream. It wasn't just Little House on the Prairie.
It was survival of the fittest, and some people
didn't survive. So let's talk about the style
she used to tell these stories. Because you mentioned
earlier that she wasn't writing like the modernists
like... Joyce or Virginia Woolf doing Stream
of Consciousness. But she also wasn't doing the
overstuffed journalism thing from her McClure's
days anymore. She developed this concept she
called the unfurnished novel. The unfurnished
novel. Yes. This is her great contribution to
literary theory, and it came directly from her
burnout with journalism. She read a famous essay
about this. She felt that traditional novels,
especially the ones by the European realists
like Balzac. were cluttered. Cluttered how? Too
many details. Exactly. They described every chair
in the room, every button on a character's coat,
every pattern on the wallpaper. She said that
wasn't art. That was just journalism. It was
just listing facts. She wanted to throw all the
furniture out of the window. She did. She believed
that the higher processes of art are all about
simplification, about selection. It's about finding
the one or two details that imply the whole scene,
the whole emotion. Can you give us an analogy?
How does this actually work for the reader? How
does it feel different? Think about the difference
between a cluttered Victorian parlor and a Japanese
ink painting. In the ink painting, you might
just have one swift brushstroke that suggests
mountain and another that suggests the mist.
Your mind fills in the rest. Cather wanted her
prose to be like that brushstroke. So instead
of describing the prairie grass for three pages,
listing every species, she just gives you one
powerful sensory hit. Precisely. In My Antonia,
there's this famous simple description of the
sunset. She writes, The whole circle of the world
was just the empty sky and the red grass. She
doesn't list the types of clouds. She focuses
on two things, the color red and the feeling
of emptiness. It's incredibly lucid and objective,
but it's also deeply emotional. Your own memories
of sunsets fill in the gaps. It feels like she's
trying to capture the quality of a memory rather
than a photograph. That is a beautiful way to
put it. That's exactly it. It has the emotional
resonance of a vivid memory. She famously said,
I will not paint the matter, but the emotion
of the matter. And that style, that middle ground
she carved out between facts and feelings, it
resonated with people. She became hugely successful.
Which brings us to section four, success, the
Pulitzer and the Hemingway feud. Because now
we're in the 1920s. Cather is a big deal. She's
a literary star. She's on the cover of Time magazine
eventually. She is fully established, and she's
also becoming a very savvy businesswoman. By
1920, she is completely fed up with her publisher,
Houghton Mifflin. What was the beef there? What
were they doing wrong? They were cheap. They
used cheap paper, the bindings were flimsy, and
they didn't spend enough money on advertising.
Cather knew her worth by this point. She knew
she was building a legacy, and she wanted her
books to be beautiful, lasting objects. So she
walked. She switched to a young, up -and -coming
publisher named Alfred A. Knopf. Nuff is a legendary
name in publishing now. The Borzoi dog logo is
iconic. And Willa Cather helped make that happen.
She loved Nuff because he cared about book design.
He believed a book should be a work of art in
itself. She liked the look of his book so much
that she actually put it in her contract that
all her subsequent books had to match a specific
design he used. If you look at a shelf of vintage
Cather first editions, they have a uniform, elegant
look. green cloth, specific typography. That
was all her doing. She was branding herself.
That's incredibly smart. So she has the look.
She has the publisher. And then comes the peak.
In 1923, she wins the Pulitzer Prize for her
novel, One of Ours. One of Ours. This is the
book that really started the fight. It's a departure
for her. It's set during World War I. It's about
a Nebraska farm boy named Claude Wheeler who
feels stifled and purposeless on the farm. And
he goes off to fight in France. So she takes
her classic Nebraska pioneer theme and moves
it to the trenches of World War I. Correct. And
the public absolutely loved it. It was a massive
bestseller. The Pulitzer Committee loved it.
But the critics and specifically the other writers
of her generation, they had their knives out.
Enter Ernest Hemingway. Enter Hemingway. Now
we have to set the stage here. Hemingway is young.
He's ambitious. He's part of the lost generation.
And crucially, he had actually been in the war.
He drove an ambulance in Italy. He was wounded.
He had seen the grit, the mud, the chaos, the
senselessness of it all. And Cather. Cather was
a woman in her late 40s who had obviously not
been in the trenches. She did her research. She
interviewed veterans. But she wasn't there. She
didn't have that firsthand experience. And Hemingway
did not hold back. What exactly did he say? It
was in a letter, right? It was in a private letter
to the critic Edmund Wilson in 1923. It's become
infamous. He just savaged one of ours. He specifically
went after the battle scenes. He wrote, and I'm
paraphrasing here. Do you know where that came
from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation.
Whoa. He accused her of plagiarizing D .W. Griffith's
silent movie. He claimed she ripped off the movie
because she didn't know what war really looked
like. He coined a term for it. He called her
writing catharized. Catharized. That is a sick
burn. He's basically saying her version of war
was a Hollywood production. a sanitized, romanticized
version of the real thing. That's exactly what
he was saying. He was accusing her of romanticizing
the war. He said sneeringly, poor woman, she
had to get her war experience somewhere. It was
incredibly dismissive, and frankly, it was deeply
sexist. But it did highlight a real fundamental
philosophical divide. Let's unpack that divide.
Yeah. Because it's not just Hemingway was mean
to Cather. It's about two completely different
ways of seeing the world and the purpose of literature.
Exactly. Cather was what you might call a romantic
realist. In one of ours, her protagonist, Claude,
actually finds a sense of purpose in the war.
He finds beauty and ideals worth dying for. It's
tragic, yes, but it's also noble and chivalric.
And Hemingway and his cohort. The modernists,
the lost generation, they saw that as an obscene
lie. They saw war as a meaningless industrial
meat grinder. They believed there was no purpose,
only death and disillusionment. For them, Cather's
attempt to give the war meaning and beauty was
offensive. It was a betrayal of the truth of
their experience. So you have this massive split.
Cather represents the old guard, a belief in
values, ideals, meaning. And Hemingway represents
the new guard cynicism. Grit, fragmentation,
and a brutal kind of truth. And even though she
won the Pulitzer, the critical tide was turning
towards Hemingway's way of thinking. The cool
kids in the literary world were starting to see
Cather as old -fashioned. And that critical turn
gets even sharper in the 1930s, which brings
us to Section 5. The Great Depression hits. The
world changes overnight. The roaring 20s were
about abundance and art for art's sake. The 1930s
were about survival and social struggle. And
suddenly, Willa Cather's beautiful, timeless
stories about the past, about pioneers and French
archbishops, they started to look to some influential
critics like escapism. They accused her of romantic
nostalgia, of burying her head in the sand. Critics
like Granville Hicks and Edmund Wilson really
turned on her. They were politically motivated,
mostly left -leaning. And they argued that because
she wasn't writing novels about about bread lines
or labor strikes or the immediate social problems
of 1932, she was irrelevant. They basically said
she was a lady writer hiding in the past. Her
own politics didn't help her case with that crap.
No, they certainly didn't. She was a registered
Republican. She was skeptical of the New Deal
and big government programs. She was very conservative
in her personal views. That absolutely alienated
the left -leaning critics who dominated the literary
scene in the 30s. They wanted art to be a weapon
for social change. And Cather just fundamentally...
believed art should be art. But I want to push
back on this escapist label for a second. Was
she actually ignoring the suffering around her?
I mean, was she just sitting in her fancy Park
Avenue apartment, oblivious? That is the great
irony. Publicly, she did seem detached. She refused
to sign petitions or join political committees.
But privately, she was deeply involved in helping
people. She was sending a steady stream of money
back to Nebraska. To who? To organizations? No,
directly to people. to the farmers she knew,
to the Annie Pavelka family, the real -life Antonia
who were suffering greatly during the Dust Bowl
and the Depression. The banks were foreclosing
on everyone. Willa Cather was personally bankrolling
her old friends to keep them from losing their
land. She was quietly keeping people afloat.
She just didn't write novels about it. So she
separated her art from her charity, from her
politics. She believed art shouldn't be propaganda.
She believed art should be timeless. Her argument
was, if you write about the specific political
issue of 1932, your book might be completely
irrelevant by 1940. She wanted to write about
the eternal things, the human soul, our connection
to the land. She said something like, economics
are temporary. The land and the people are eternal.
But she did care deeply about how her work was
presented and adapted. We have to talk about
the Lost Lady film. This story explains why we
don't see a new Willa Cather movie on Netflix
every year. Oh, this is a very sore spot in her
biography. In 1934, Hollywood made a film version
of her novel, A Lost Lady. Starring Barbara Stanwyck,
I believe. A huge star. Yes. And Cather hated
it. She absolutely loathed it. Critics hated
it, too. By all accounts, it bore little resemblance
to her book. They took this subtle, complex,
psychological portrait of a woman's moral decline
and turned it into a cheap Typical Hollywood
melodrama. So she pulled the plug on any future
adaptation. A slant down, hard. She put strict
prohibitions in her will against the dramatization
of her works. No more movies, no plays. She didn't
want Hollywood messing with her vision ever again.
She chose artistic integrity over a lot of money.
She was fiercely protective, which is a perfect
segue to section six. The private life of Willa
Cather. Because if she was protective of her
books, she was Fort Knox about her personal life.
This is the part of her story that has really
exploded in scholarship in recent years. For
a long, long time, the official narrative was
that Cather was a spinster who was dedicated
solely to her art, a sort of none of American
literature. Married to her work. Right. But the
reality is much more complex and much more human.
And on the center of that reality is a woman
named Edith Lewis. Edith Lewis. Tell us about
her. Edith Lewis was a magazine editor, a professional
woman, very smart, very capable. And she was
Willa Cather's domestic partner for the last
39 years of her life. 39 years. That is a marriage.
by any other name it was a life partnership they
lived together first in greenwich village then
on park avenue and lewis wasn't just a roommate
she was a literary trustee she typed the manuscripts
she edited the drafts she was cather's first
reader and most trusted critic they traveled
together to the southwest for research they built
a life together so this brings us to the big
question and i know scholars argue about the
terminology was she a lesbian Can we use that
word? It is a subject of intense debate. Some
scholars argue it's anachronistic to apply the
modern word lesbian to a woman of her time because
Cather wouldn't have used it for herself. She
came from a Victorian background where women
often had these very intense, passionate, romantic
friendships that were to some degree socially
accepted. But looking at the evidence through
a modern lens. The evidence leans heavily towards
yes. She had a series of intense, romantic, and
emotionally central relationships with women
throughout her entire life. Louise Pound in college,
Isabel McClung in Pittsburgh. That was a huge
life -altering relationship. And it was a terrible
heartbreak for Cather when Isabel got married.
And then the stable 39 -year life partnership
with Edith Lewis. But Cather herself tried to
cover her tracks. This is the burning part of
the story. She did. She was a resolutely private
person. As she got older, she became obsessed
with controlling her legacy. She started writing
to her friends and asking them to return her
letters, and then she burned them. She destroyed
many drafts of her novels. She wanted to be judged
only by her finished published art, not by her
private life. Not everyone burned the letters,
did they? Exactly. People are hoarders, thankfully,
for history. Her friends and family held on to
some of them. In 2013, against the wishes expressed
in her will, a collection called The Selected
Letters of Willa Cather was finally published.
It was a revelation. What was in them? Was it
scandalous? Were there love letters? It wasn't
scandalous in a graphic, explicit sense. There
was no smoking gun detailing physical intimacy.
But what it revealed was the emotional intensity.
The way she wrote to Edith Lewis, the way she
wrote about her heartbreak over Isabel McClung,
it showed a person whose entire emotional world
was centered on women. There's a quote from a
scholar, Melissa Homestead, who wrote a great
book about Catherine Lewis. She basically asks,
you know, what evidence do you need? Photos of
them in bed. The fact that she lived with a woman
for 40 years and that woman was the executor
of her literary estate. That says a lot. It says
almost everything. And knowing this completely
reframes how you can read her work. When you
read My Antonia Now, knowing she was writing
from a male perspective, the narrator Jim Burden,
looking at this powerful, beautiful woman, Antonia,
with such love and admiration, it adds a whole
new layer of queer coding. Was Jim Burden just
a mask for Willa herself? Many scholars think
so. The mask of Jim allowed her to express her
deep love and admiration for women in a way that
was socially acceptable at the time. It connects
all the way back to the William phase. The masculine
mask allowed her to be the observer, the lover,
the doctor, the traveler, the one with agency.
And speaking of masks and getting away from it
all, we have to mention their retreat. Because
living on Park Avenue sounds nice, but Catherine
needed to escape the city. Oh, she needed it
desperately. They had a cottage on Grand Manon
Island in New Brunswick, Canada. It was way off
the grid. How off the grid are we talking? We're
talking primitive. No plumbing, no electricity,
a little cottage at a place called Whale Cove.
This was where she went to escape the noise of
New York and the critics and the social obligations.
She and Edith Lewis would go there for the summers.
It was in that profound isolation that she wrote
some of her later books like Lucy Gayheart. She
needed that silence to hear the voice of her
fiction. I just love that image. The famous,
sophisticated Pulitzer Prize winner. chopping
wood and lighting kerosene lamps just to get
some peace and quiet to write. It speaks to that
central tension we talked about at the beginning.
She was a sophisticated, wealthy, successful
woman, but her soul was still seeking that wild
space, that connection to the elements she first
encountered and was terrified by in Nebraska.
So let's go to the final chapter, Section 7,
the final years and posthumous mysteries. We're
in the 1940s now. The world is at war again.
And the tone of her work changes again. In 1940,
she publishes what would be her last completed
novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. This one
is set in Virginia, right? So she's going all
the way back to her roots. It is. It goes back
to her pre -Nebraska childhood, to that world
of willow shade. And it is a dark book. It deals
with slavery, with jealousy, with deep moral
ambiguity. The central plot involves a white
mistress, Sapphira, who becomes so jealous of
a beautiful, young, enslaved girl that she plots
to have her own nephew rape the girl to ruin
her. Yikes. That is a long, long way from the
heroic pioneers of O 'Pioneers. It is. It's un
- Unsettling. It shows a writer in her later
years grappling with the darker side of human
nature and specifically with the complicated,
ugly history of her own family and her own region
in the South. It was a critical success, but
it surprised a lot of her readers. And she was
working on something else when she died. A mystery
project that I am completely obsessed with. The
unfinished novel. It was titled Hard Punishments.
That's a heavy title. Hard Punishments. What
was it about? The setting is the most surprising
part. It wasn't Nebraska. It wasn't Virginia.
It was set in 14th century Avignon, France, during
the time of the Avignon papacy. Medieval France.
That's a huge leap from the prairie. It shows
her incredible range and her lifelong fascination
with French culture. but hard punishments. We
will never know exactly what it was. Because
of the pack. Because of her will. Willa Cather
died on April 24th, 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
And following her strict, explicit instructions,
Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of hard
punishments. That hurts. As a reader, that physically
hurts me. To think of those pages, that story
going into the fire. It's a great loss to literature.
But as a partner, as a friend, Edith was loyal
to the absolute end. She protected Cather's wishes
above the world's curiosity. It just raises this
fascinating what if. What would a Willa Cather
medieval novel have looked like? How would it
have changed her legacy? We can only speculate.
So she passes away. And where is she buried?
Not in Virginia. Not back home in Nebraska. She's
buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. New Hampshire?
Why New Hampshire? It was a place she had visited
often with Isabel McClung and her husband. She
loved the quiet of it. She loved the iconic mountain
there, Mountain Adnock. And crucially, Edith
Lewis is buried right there alongside her. In
the end, they're together. They are. Just simply
together in a quiet corner of New England. So
let's zoom out. We've unpacked this incredible
life from the tomboy William dissecting frogs
on the plains to the Park Avenue Pulitzer winner
who summered in a shack in Canada. What is the
lasting legacy here? I think her primary legacy
is that she validated the American immigrant
story before it was popular or fashionable to
do so. She took the people who were considered
others, the bohemians, the struggling farmers,
the people speaking broken English, and she gave
them the status of epic heroes. She made their
story as important as the story of Odysseus or
Aeneas. She made the Midwest mystical. She gave
it a soul when others thought it was just empty
space. She absolutely did. And she did it by
forging that unique middle ground style. She
managed to stand midway between the dry, cluttered
facts of journalism and the chaotic, subjective
stream of consciousness of the modernists. She
created a style that was lucid, clear, and yet
deeply emotional. She proved that what you leave
out of a story is just as important as what you
put in. So here's the so what for the listener.
Why does Willa Cather matter today in 2026? I
think she matters because she reminds us that
place shapes who we are profoundly. In a world
where we're all increasingly online and everything
feels the same, where every coffee shop and airport
looks identical, Cather reminds us that the specific
light on a specific hill, the sound of the wind
in a specific valley, creates a specific kind
of human soul. She champions the local in a world
that is obsessed with the global. And here's
the provocative thought I want to leave everyone
with, building on that. We spent a lot of this
deep dive talking about her private life. about
Edith Lewis, the letters, the sexuality debate.
Cather fought so hard to control that narrative.
She burned the letters. She put a ban on the
publication of her correspondence in her will.
She wanted the art to stand alone. She wanted
you to read the book, not the biography. Exactly.
Yet in 2013, we published the letters anyway.
We are right now obsessively analyzing her sexuality.
So the question is this. Does our modern desire
to know the author, to categorize their identity,
to solve the mystery of their private life, actually
violate the very art they tried to create? That
is the ultimate tension, isn't it? By digging
into her private life, are we finding the real
Willa Cather? Or are we losing that middle ground
she worked so hard to establish? Are we cluttering
her unfurnished novel back up with all the furniture
of her biography? Are we just dragging all the
furniture she threw out the window right back
into the room? We might be. A very real possibility.
It's something to think about the next time you
pick up my Antonia. Maybe it's better to just
let the wind blow through the red grass and not
ask too many questions about who was holding
the pen. Perhaps. Read the book, feel the wind,
and let the rest be mystery. Thanks for diving
in with us. We will catch you on the next one.