Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.

Reveals the legacy of the train as a critical site of race in the United States Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music. The Racial Railroad highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played—and continues to play—in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives. Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement—from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation—the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

This book presents interprative approaches to Willa Cather based on materials available in the Drew University Cather Collection. The scholars suggest the work left to do on Willa Cather, and the diverse directions in which scholars now must travel.

The Second Western Megapack presents a wide-ranging selection of western stories sure to get your pulse racing. Here are action tales of the old west by masters such as Zane Grey, Ed Earl Repp, Robert E. Howard, Clarence E. Mulford, Max Brand -- and many more. More than 2,000 pages of great reading! Complete contents: QUICK PAY FOR MAVERICK MEN, by Ed Earl Repp TOM’S MONEY, by Harriet Prescott Spofford WHILE SMOKE ROLLED, by Robert E. Howard THE AFFAIR AT GROVER STATION, by Willa Cather THE OUTLAW PILOT, by Stephen Payne READY FOR A COFFIN, by Gene Austin BULLDOG CARNEY, by W. A. Fraser DUST, by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius THE JIMMYJOHN BOSS, by Owen Wister THE APACHE MOUNTAIN WAR, by Robert E. Howard ABOVE THE LAW, by Max Brand WITH GUTS, GUN, AND SCALPEL, by Archie Joscelyn THE END OF THE TRAIL, by Clarence E. Mulford THE WILD-HORSE HUNTER, by Zane Grey THE HONK-HONK BREED, by Stewart Edward White THE TEXAN SCOUTS, by Joseph A. Altsheler THE ROAD TO BEAR CREEK, by Robert E. Howard A KINSMAN OF RED CLOUD, by Owen Wister NO REPORT, by S. Omar Barke THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN, by Zane Grey GUNMAN’S RECKONING, by Max Brand LITTLE BIG HORN MEDICINE, by Owen Wister THE LONE RANGER RIDES, by Fran Striker MAN SIZE, by William MacLeod Raine COLUMBIA AND THE COWBOY, by Alice MacGowan And don't forget to search this ebook store for "Wildside Megapack" to see all the entries in the Megapack series -- including volumes of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, westerns, classics, and much, much more!

Drawing on letters, interviews, speeches, and reminiscences, looks at the life and career of the American novelist.

Nothing better represented the early spirit of American expansion than the railroad. Dominant in daily life as well as in the popular imagination, the railroad appealed strongly to creative writers. For many years, fiction of railroad life and travel was plentiful and varied. As the nineteenth century receded, the railroad's allure faded, as did railroad fiction. Today, it is hard to sense what the railroad once meant to Americans. The fiction of the railroad--often by railroaders themselves--recaptures that sense, and provides valuable insights on American cultural history. This extensively annotated bibliography lists and discusses in 956 entries novels and short stories from the 1840s to the present in which the railroad is important. Each entry includes plot and character description to help the reader make an informed decision on the source's merit. A detailed introduction discusses the history of railroad fiction and highlights common themes such as strikes, hoboes, and the roles of women and African-Americans. Such writers of "pure" railroad fiction as Harry Bedwell, Frank Packard, and Cy Warman are well represented, along with such literary artists as Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, and Ellen Glasgow. Work by minority writers, including Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Frank Chin, and Toni Morrison, also receives close attention. An appendix organizes entries by decade of publication, and the work is indexed by subject and title.