Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art

by Willa Cather, Stephen Tennant (Foreword by)

"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created." This famous observation appears in Willa Cather on Writing , a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity, about her own fiction and that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Mansfield, among others. She concludes, "Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all—no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself—a game of make-believe, of re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it."

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Classics, Literary Criticism

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Wilella Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley (Gore), Virginia, in December 7, 1873.

She grew up in Virginia and Nebraska. She then attended the University of Nebraska, initially planning to become a physician, but after writing an article for the Nebraska State Journal, she became a regular contributor to this journal. Because of this, she changed her major and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English.

After graduation in 1894, she worked in Pittsburgh as writer for various publications and as a school teacher for approximately 13 years, thereafter moving to New York City for the remainder of her life.

Her novels on frontier life brought her to national recognition. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, 'One of Ours' (1922), set during World War I. She travelled widely and often spent summers in New Brunswick, Canada. In later life, she experienced much negative criticism for her conservative politics and became reclusive, burning some of her letters and personal papers, including her last manuscript.

She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments.

She died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 73 in New York City.

Reviews

[Christine Norvell · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To note an artist's limitations is but to define his genius."

A fine summary, Stephen Tennant's foreword, "The Room Beyond," centers on Cather's writing style and on her abilities as a critic. It's worth reading!

As Cather comments on her novels or answers an editor's letter, she also addresses a myriad of ideas related to writing. Many times these gems lay hidden in one of the prefaces to another author's work. She discusses social warriors in 1936, true v. fake writing intentions, censorship, real poets and poetry, studying the classics, and more. I was especially fascinated by her comments on modernism, where twenty-somethings in the 1930s wanted to ditch Goethe and Shakespeare for all new literature.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered this little book at a local used bookstore. Some pieces are reflections on her own work while others are literary criticism about the writing of others. Cather brings her quick wit to an essay about one of DeFoe's novels and her thoughtfulness to ideas about writing. Her literary criticism is a view into another time. Other than the rather pompous introduction by someone other than Cather, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection.

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was on a list of books to select as a potential textbook for one of my classes this semester. Rather than picking one at random, I started at the beginning of the list and am working my way down. Honestly, I thought the author of the forward would have been a better author of a book on writing. This one is a compilation of Cather's writings on other subjects, with the majority falling into one of the following categories: a) praising someone for giving her a positive review, b) lighting into someone for giving her a negative review, c) praising the writing of her friends in a review of her own, d) tearing down other writers in review of the works of authors she doesn't personally know. It was honestly a better insight into her character than it was a book on writing as an art. My main takeaway from this one was that she was probably a very catty person.

The only reason I rate it so high is that there are certain turns of phrase, like throwing furniture out the window, that I looked at and went, "if you strip her complaints and writing and take just that phrase completely out of context, this would make a fun writing exercise."

[Gabrielle Jarrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose Willa Cather's 1920 book on writing to balance out some of my other reading of writers on writing. I am also a writer and just finished Stephen King's book On Writing which required balance. She is definitely not about collecting information/material for fiction. Nor is she about extensive plotting. She suggest no scenes, no narrative writing explaining these are created by the character's and their dialogue, both inner and outer. The great natural forces and great elegant emotions cannot be written but only shown through the characters' experience. A deeper way of explaining the current "show don't tell" writers' advice, but written ever so eloquently. Very helpful.

[Janisse Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a disappointing little book. I think Willa Cather is one of the most important American writers of all time, and I am really interested in learning more of her thinking on writing itself. This book, however, is just a compilation of dribs and drabs of her work. She definitely did not put this together, although all the excerpts were written by her. I think this was a moneymaker book put together by Knopf. I did learn a few things: 1) Her fascination with Sarah Orne Jewett and also Katherine Mansfield; and 2) how much she read & engaged with other women writers; and 3) that simplicity is the key to art. Now I have to go really find her writings on the art form.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cather is at her strongest and her weakest when writing about other writers. She has the perceptive eye of an artist to understand the craft, but often has the writer’s ego to criticize and devalue work that doesn’t align with her own preferences. These are both on display here. The preface by Stephen Tennant constantly refers to Cather’s "warmth," which is baffling, since I believe her criticism to embody just the opposite. While her fiction might sometimes be labeled such, while at other times it is nothing less than cutting and sarcastic, her criticism of other writers, at least what I have read here and in other places, is usually directly to the point – almost brutally so.

This is not an essential volume, but it might make for a supplemental reading for anyone who has read most of Cather’s fiction and wants to delve into the nonfiction.

[Cathy Bown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, which I mistakingly took for a writing guide, is more of an analysis of writers known to Cather. There are a few brief chapters on Cather's writing, but mostly it is a collection of letters jumbled together and stuck in one volume that feels exceptionally disjointed.

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting to hear from the author herself.

[Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spotted on a friend's coffee table: I like WIlla Cather, I like writing, and it's short. This isn't a coherent volume at all, just some scattered introductions and reviews, but Cather's aesthetics are so different from those predominating today that a few hours of visiting with them is bracing, salutary.

Perhaps the easiest summary here of that difference is in the Foreword by one Stephen Tennant (itself dating to 1949): "A great writer should always have an anonymous quality, something remote like a pregnant silence—which is silent, and yet contains all sound, all time, all things." Cather finds that greatness in Sarah Orne Jewett, Katherine Mansfield, and Stephen Crane, and emphatically not in Defoe's Roxana. She seems to have gotten the memo about the worth of negative reviews.

The Roxana essay (written as an introduction to a Knopf reissue!) damns the book as petty, mercantile, and heartless, making no allowance for that being Defoe's intent. In that essay and in "The Novel Démeublé" (it's another sign of this book's antiquity that French words and passages are not translated for the reader), Cather spares nothing in condemning the then-hot (she wrote most of these pieces in the '20s) novel of bottomless description and endless domestic detail. I wonder how Franzen might respond to her points; but I also wonder where Perec's Les Choses fits into her scheme. That novel's insistent foregrounding of material items and commercial transactions seems, thanks to Cather, to have been anticipated by Defoe's novel, and while neither one would hold any position on her axis of literary value, I can now see a possible progression of experiments in coopting non-literary language for literary purposes.

There's not much here that will directly help the writer with his or her own projects, but it's a quick and refreshing reminder that the way we read and write doesn't have to have changed with times and technology. Some classics are classics for good reason.

[Heather M L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering this was a collection of writing Cather did "on writing" and literature that was published after her death it's decent.I think Cather could have written a hell of a book if she ever did write a book on writing. I think she would have echoed a lot of the lessons Orne Jewett shared with her, such as she does in the preface to one of Jewett's novels that is shared in this collection. There's just never enough Cather is what I find.......I love that she encourages people to dig deep into their hearts and what they know, and to look for the people one knows. It's what makes her works so amazing and simple. She writes what she knows, about the relationship between people, land, and what they know. There's no twisting in her writing to create something. She writes about what is there. There are no others like Willa Cather.

[Tom Britz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short and yet insightful book on what Willa Cather thought as art versus the commercial novel makers.

[Joanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full of little gems!