Willa Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1923. She served as the fiction editor for McClure’s Magazine,  where she had a great deal of influence on other writers of her time. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald was so worried that she would think he’d stolen from her novel A Lost Lady  that in April of 1925 she received a startling letter from him. Fitzgerald, whom Cather admired but had never met, wrote to her that he feared she would see his description of Daisy Buchanan as an instance of "apparent plagirism" because Cather had described Marian Forrester in a similar manner. He was anxious to show her that he'd written his description before A Lost Lady had been published, and sent her copies of his manuscript pages to prove it. She graciously replied that"the only way to describe beauty was to describe its effect," and said she saw no instance of plagirism.

Yet after her death in 1947, and for many years of American letters following, she was considered a "minor" American writer. This honors seminar will not only re-examine Cather’s work in depth, but will follow the fortunes of "literary politics" in reviewing how this American writer was both made and, for a period of time, "lost" by English departments until the 1970's.

Unit I  An Unusual American Master (Aug. 25-Sept. 17)
Unit II The Pioneer Spirit (Sept. 24-Oct. 15)
Unit III Transformations (Oct. 22-Nov. 26)
Unit IV Researching Cather (Dec. 3-10)

All titles will be available at Wild Iris Books, 802 W. University Ave.
375-7477. Supplemental readings will be provided by instructor. Some of these will be online, and some will be handed out in class. Some of these are NOT ON the syllabus as written because this is a research honors seminar and we are likely to find resources to use as we pursue our mutual research. This instructor reserves the right to ADD to the syllabus as we go alone. A class is a living organism, not a headstone! Even if I've started the syllabus with a quote from a headstone!