Over forty short stories survey the initial years of discovery and artistic development of the beloved American author

Over forty short stories survey the initial years of discovery and artistic development of the beloved American author

For a half-century - from Edward Eggleston's pioneering novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 through the dazzling early work of Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s - Midwestern literature was at the center of American writing. In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald Weber illuminates the sense of lost promise that gives rise to the elegiac note struck in many Midwestern works; he also addresses the deeply divided feelings about the region revealed in the contrary desires to abandon and to celebrate. The period of Midwestern cultural ascendancy was a time of tremendous social and technological change. Midwestern writing was a reflection of these societal changes; it was American literature.

The seven stories in this volume were written during the ascending and perhaps most triumphant years of Willa Cather's career, the period during which she published nine books, including My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are, as Bernice Slote observes, bound by the geometrics of urban life—streets and offices, workers and firms, the business world of New York and Pittsburgh, the cities which by 1929 Willa Cather had known well for over thirty years." In her introduction, Slote discusses their biographical elements, connections with earlier and later work, and the intricate patterns that lie below the lucid, shimmering surface of Willa Cather's prose.