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But quotation, often unjust, cannot do Willa Cather justice. Her manner of writing has little in common with her noisy day. Characterized by an English critic as "that rara avis, an autochthonous American author," she is most conveniently classified by negatives. Says the same critic: "The King Charles's head of psychoanalysis and experiment in genre does not keep continually turning up in her books as they do [sic] in those rather Mr. Dick-like compositions of Mr. Sherwood Anderson for instance." Unlike Sinclair Lewis, she does not bite her country's hand; unlike Edith Wharton (whose example influenced her early work) she casts no nostalgic backward glances toward Europe; unlike Ernest Hemingway, she carries no gnawing fox in her devoted bosom. Her simple, colloquial language obeys the canon of good prose (she rereads Pilgrim's Progress annually), and in that is unremarkable. But she has an individual quality, positive attributes which hide their light under a phrase or even a paragraph, but which shine through her pages like moonlight under water. When she was much younger (she is 54) she used to read Henry James and try to write "beautifully"; experience has rescued her writing from self-consciousness and quotation marks.
The Author. Willa Sibert Cather looks and talks like a kindly, sensible Middle-Western housewife, stout, low-heeled, good at marketing and mending. Her motherly hats are fluttered by no mercurial wings. A spinster, there is nothing old maidish about her comfortable appearance; only her keen blue eyes belie her look of somewhat stolid placidity. Though you would never guess it from her voice she comes from Virginia, but her father moved the family to a Nebraska ranch, near Red Cloud, when she was eight. Instead of going to school she rode her pony around the country, getting acquainted with her polyglot neighbors: Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Bohemians, Germans, French Canadians. "I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they had told me so much more than they said—as if I had actually got inside another person's skin." She likes Nebraska: "It's a queer thing about the flat country—it takes hold of you, or it leaves you perfectly cold. A great many people find it dull and monotonous; they like a church steeple, an old mill, a waterfall, country all touched up and furnished, like a German Christmas card. I go everywhere, I admire all kinds of country. I tried to live in France. But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea—it's the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I've stopped trying. It's incurable." When she was living in France she used to haunt the wheat fields; once while she watched the harvesting she burst into homesick tears.