A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather’s work and Cather scholarship. Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times. The contributors explore both the objects among which Cather lived and the objects that appear in her writings, as well as the commercial constraints of the publishing industry in which her art was made and marketed. Essays address her relationship to quilts both personally and as symbols in her work; her contributions to domestic magazines such as Home Monthly and Woman's Home Companion; the problematic nature of Hollywood productions of her work; and her efforts and successes as a businesswoman. By establishing the centrality of material matters to her writing, these essays contribute to the reclaiming of Cather as a modernist and highlight the significance of material culture, in general, to the study of American literature.

This bittersweet tale about a professor's desire to stay in his old study and cling to what used to be on the eve of moving into a new house sparks deep introspection in a story that explores a mid-life crisis and family life in a 1920s Midwestern college town.

The World of Willa Cather describes the people and places in Nebraska that figure prominently in many of Cather’s best novels and short stories. It offers material that can be found nowhere else. Here are Willa Cather of Red Cloud, her family and friends, and the things that formed her sensibilities.

Linking Willa Cather to ?the modern? or ?modernism? still seems an eccentric proposition to some people. Born in 1873, Cather felt tied to the past when she witnessed the emergence of twentieth-century modern culture, and the clean, classical sentences in her fiction contrast starkly with the radically experimental prose of prominent modernists. Nevertheless, her representations of place in the modern world reveal Cather as a writer able to imagine a startling range of different cultures. Divided into two sections, the essays in Cather Studies, Volume 9 examine Willa Cather as an author with an innovative receptivity to modern cultures and a powerful affinity with the visual and musical arts. From the interplay between modern and antimodern in her representations of native culture to the music and visual arts that animated her imagination, the essays are unified by an understanding of Cather as a writer of transition whose fiction meditates on the cultural movement from Victorianism into the twentieth century.ø

Time Magazine's 10 Top Nonfiction Books of the Year • Willa Cather’s letters—withheld from publication for more than six decades—are finally available to the public in this fascinating selection. The hundreds collected here range from witty reports of life as a teenager in Red Cloud in the 1880s through her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and her growing eminence as a novelist. They describe her many travels and record her last years, when the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II brought her near to despair. Above all, they reveal her passionate interest in people, literature, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from her fiction: confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, concerned with profound ideas, but also at times sentimental, sarcastic, and funny. A deep pleasure to read, this volume reveals the intimate joys and sorrows of one of America’s most admired writers.

My Antonia is a novel by an American writer Willa Cather. It is the final book of the "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants. They are both became pioneers and settled in Nebraska in the end of the 19th century. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions in both children, affecting them lifelong. The narrator and the main character of the novel My Antonia, Jim grows up in Black Hawk, Nebraska from age 10 Eventually, he becomes a successful lawyer and moves to New York City.

Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, Willa Cather presented a wholesome view of a vanished America. In this new biography, Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. 27 illustrations.