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Development of Willa Cather as a Writer When Willa Cather left home and went to col

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 middleclass upbringing, boldly established an unconventional, experimental social image. Calling herself William Cather, she established a campuswide 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 collegeeducated young man, to seek artistic and financial success. For more than ten years she worked as managing editor for the Pittsburghbased McClure's Magazine, producing literary and theatrical criticism as well as short fiction for the publication, 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 fulltime writer.

These selfdramatizing career and adultlife beginningswhich today would cause raised eyebrows among only the most straitlaced in the culturesuggest 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 but with a whole range of characters and personalities, some who above all...

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Development of Willa Cather as a Writer When Willa Cather left home and went to col. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:49, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701526.html