Although it has long been claimed that Willa Cather destroyed most of her letters in order to protect her privacy, the record now makes clear that this is largely myth: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather digital archive has collected more than three thousand letters, and more are regularly being located. What can we learn about Cather and her fiction from such a wealth of firsthand writings? The essays in Willa Cather and Letters use a variety of approaches to consider ...

Over the five decades of her writing career Willa Cather responded to, and entered into dialogue with, shifts in the terrain of American life. These cultural encounters informed her work as much as the historical past in which much of her writing is based. Cather was a multifaceted cultural critic, immersing herself in the arts, broadly defined: theater and opera, art, narrative, craft production. Willa Cather and the Arts shows that Cather repeatedly engaged with multiple forms o...

American author Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life.The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 14 seek to unsettle prevailing assumptions about Cather’s work as she moved from Virginia to Nebr...

Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century explores, with textual specificity and historical alertness, the question of how the cultures of the nineteenth century—the cultures that shaped Willa Cather’s childhood, animated her education, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to many of her deeply held values—are addressed in her fiction.In two related sets of essays, seven contributors track within Cather’s life or writing the p...

Willa Cather wrote about the places she knew, including Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia. Often forgotten among these essential locations has been Pittsburgh. During the ten years Pittsburgh was her home (1896–1906), Cather worked as an editor, journalist, teacher, and freelance writer. She mixed with all sorts of people and formed friendships both ephemeral and lasting. She published extensively—and not just profiles and reviews but also a collection of poetry, April Twili...

Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather’s position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather’s position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays.The first section takes up Cather’s beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influence...

In March of 2006, scholars from around the world gathered in Sun Valley, Idaho for a conference devoted to not only John Steinbeck but also to the authors whose work influenced, informs, or illuminates his writings. This volume represents the many unique papers delivered at that conference by scholars from around the world. This collection includes studies on authors who influenced Steinbeck's work, discussions of writers whose work is in dialogue with Steinbeck, and examinations of Steinb...

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved.In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, Sheilah Graham met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a party in Hollywood. Graham, a British-born journalist, broke off her engagement, and until Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack in her apartment in 1940, the two writers lived the fervid, sometimes ...

A never-before-published collection of letters - an intimate self-portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ral...

In Advice to Writers, Jon Winokur, author of the bestselling The Portable Curmudgeon, gathers the counsel of more than four hundred celebrated authors in a treasury on the world of writing. Here are literary lions on everything from the passive voice to promotion and publicity: James Baldwin on the practiced illusion of effortless prose, Isaac Asimov on the despotic tendencies of editors, John Cheever on the perils of drink, Ivan Turgenev on matrimony and ...

You're no idiot, of course. You know that Samuel Clemens had a better-known pen name, Moby Dick is a famous whale, and the Raven only said,"Nevermore." But when it comes to understanding the great works of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, you'd rather rent the videos than head to your local library. Don't tear up your library card yet! The Complete Idiot's Guide® to American Literature teaches you all about the rich tradition of American prose and poetry, so you c...

ox-y-mor-on-i-ca (OK-se-mor-ON-uh-ca) noun, plural: Any variety of tantalizing, self-contradictory statements or observations that on the surface appear false or illogical, but at a deeper level are true, often profoundly true. See also oxymoron, paradox.examples:"Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad."Victor Hugo"To lead the people, walk behind them."Lao-tzu"You'd be surprised how much it coststo look this cheap."Dolly PartonY...