Making It New: 1900–1945 333Glasgow’s evolution from “radical” to “conservative”: the change in tendency, from
progressivism to conservatism, is still there. And both the conflict and the change
declare Glasgow very much a writer of her times, someone writing of fundamental
social alterations that affected her, especially, because she had been brought up in a
place where and period when the terms “writing,” “career,” and “woman” were just
about mutually exclusive.
Like Glasgow, Willa Cather was born in Virginia. Only her last novel, Sapphira and
the Slave Girl (1940), is set there, however. And in 1883, when she was only 10, she
moved with her family to Nebraska. Webster County, where they settled, was still on
the frontier and there her father farmed for a year. But then, to Cather’s regret, the
family moved into the small town of Red Cloud. Cather was an unconventional
child, a tomboy inclined to dress in boy’s clothes, and she found the small town
atmosphere stifling. To escape it, she went to Lincoln, to the University of Nebraska,
and then to Pittsburgh where she worked as a journalist and then a teacher. She also
found the time to write: a book of poems was published 1903 and then a collection
of short stories, The Troll Garden, appeared two years later, showing the influence
of Henry James. Derivative though they were, they nevertheless impressed
S. S. McClure, the proprietor of McClure’s Magazine, one of the leading periodicals
of the day. He offered her a job on his magazine and in 1903 she moved to New York,
which was to be her home, apart from travels and expeditions, for the rest of her life.
She continued as a journalist until 1912, when she decided to devote herself to
writing fiction. She had been inspired to do so, in part, by her meeting with Sarah
Orne Jewett four years earlier. They became close friends, not least because Jewett
offered Cather the positive example of someone writing about their own home-
place, the local as focus for the universal. That example did not show in her first
novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), which was another, rather poor imitation of James.
However, in her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), Cather found her subject: the West,
its life and landscape, its place in American history, the American character and
imagination. She also found, again with the help of Jewett, a way of writing, a narra-
tive structure that was right for her: which was not Jamesian elaboration but what
Cather herself termed the “novel demeublé.” The novel, she decided, should be with-
out obvious artifice, free from the clutter of well-made, highly wrought fiction. The
writer’s best material, Cather felt, was there in the novelist, already molded. “If he tries
to meddle with its vague outline, to twist it into some categorical shape,” she said,
“above all if he tries to adapt or modify its mood, he destroys its value.” In working
with such material the writer should “have little to do with literary devices”; she had
“to depend more and more on something else.” What that “something else” was
Cather caught in an image that was characteristically earthy and evocative: “the thing
by which our feet find the road home on a dark night, accounting of themselves for
roots and stones which we had never noticed by day.”
Cather, as that remark suggests, had come home to her subject, her source of
inspiration. And, although based in New York, she often returned to her imaginative
homesite to stimulate her imagination. O Pioneers! was written after a trip to the
Southwest; and, after visiting the Southwest again in 1915, she produced The Song ofGGray_c04.indd 333ray_c 04 .indd 333 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM