When Willa Cather left home and went to college in 1899, she adopted the name, manner, and dress of a man. At a moment of American history that saw few women enter higher education, fewer still seek postgraduate employment in the business or professional world, Willa Cather, product of a conventional middle class upbringing, boldly established an unconventional, experimental social image. Calling herself William Cather, she established a campus wide reputation as a critic of the theatre, and planned a career as a writer. If she felt that she could succeed as a writer only as a man, this would have been consistent with the then generally accepted notion that only men in the culture were either talented enough for or temperamentally suited to the rigorous, disciplined, or indeed experimental life of the serious artist.
After graduating from the University of Nebraska with honors (by this time she was wearing dresses again), she set out for cosmopolitan America, in the manner of many a college educated young man, to seek artistic and financial success. For more than ten years she worked as managing editor for the Pittsburgh based McClure's Magazine, producing literary and theatrical criticism as well as short fiction for the magazine, accumulating a number of friends and acquaintances in the world of publishing and art, all the while perfecting her craft, accumulating material for future stories, and planning for the day she could quit her job and work as a full time writer. When she did so, she sought recognition as a woman of serious purpose.
Cather's self dramatizing career and adult life beginnings which today would cause raised eyebrows among only the most straitlaced in the culture suggest little of the reputation that Willa Cather now has as one of the more important American novelists of the twentieth century. Cather's fiction deals not merely with outrageous bohemians and others on the fringe of society bu...