The first Willa Cather I read was O Pioneers. Long after college. I thought I was reasonably well read. I knew the name, Willa Cather, of course, but assumed th

The first Willa Cather I read was O Pioneers. Long after college. I thought I was reasonably well read. I knew the name, Willa Cather, of course, but assumed that since I hadn't read any Cather (hadn't been induced to read any Cather as part of my many years of formal education) that her work must not have quite stood the test of time, somehow. I bought the book in the Gateway Arch gift shop in St Louis and read it on the airplane home. I think I must have expected a certain amount of schmaltz. Simple stories from the prairie simply told, perhaps. You could have knocked me over with a feather. So, so, so, so good; unrelentingly, from the opening paragraph to the last page. Easy to see, in just that one slim book, why her contemporaries ranked her with James, Yeats, Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway. Katherine Ann Porter wrote a short, lovely, trenchant essay, Reflections on Willa Cather, which is largely about looking (or not) for connections between an author's life and her work. Or perhaps it's mostly about Katherine Ann Porter. > This is masterly and water-clear and autobiography enough for me: my mind goes with tenderness to the lonely slow-moving girl who happened to be an artist coming back from reading Latin and Greek with the old storekeeper, helping with the housework, then sitting by the fireplace to talk down an assertive brood of brothers and sisters, practicing her art on them, refusing to be lost among them — the longest-winged one who would fly free at last.