Selected Letters of Willa Cather

 

(NYTBR) ... The great turning point for Cather came in 1912, when she traveled to the Southwest and realized that the region she had tried so desperately to flee as a young woman was, for better or worse, the place that had the deepest hold on her imagination: “The West always paralyzes me a little. When I am away from it I remember only the tang on the tongue. But when I come back [I] always feel a little of the fright I felt when I was a child. I always feel afraid of losing something, and I don’t in the least know what it is.” A few months later, when she returned to Red Cloud, Neb., all of her ambivalence was gone. The sense of homecoming struck her with the force of an epiphany — “The whole great wheat country fairly glows, and you can smell the ripe wheat as if it were bread baking” — and filled her with artistic purpose, a sense that she’d finally found her subject. Within months, she’d completed “O Pioneers!” — the book she considered her true first novel — and launched a meteoric career that would bring her enormous fame; countless honors, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923; and an enduring place in our literary pantheon. Continued