Willa Cather wrote about the lives of early Nebraska pioneers in such books as O PIONEERS! (1913) and MY ANTONIA (1918). This is an interview with the filmmakers of WILLA CATHER: THE ROAD IS ALL: Producer/Writer, Christine Lesiak, and Producer/Director, Joel Geyer.

Q: Discuss the collaborative process between the two of you as producers of this documentary film.

CHRIS: What was it like to collaborate? Joel and I have worked together for 25 years, and it seemed about time that we did a project together. And Willa Cather was perfect because we both love Willa Cather and we felt that we would bring different sensibilities to it. I wrote it. Joel directed it. And you know, there was a lot of struggle getting to that point where we came to the same vision. I mean, there are probably still places where Joel cringes and places where I cringe, but the point is, the piece works. So it was a useful and workable partnership.

JOEL: And I think the program is sharper because to do something major with the narrative or the direction, we both pretty much had to agree on it, and so we had to justify our ideas and then make sure [to] articulate them more carefully. And I think it actually makes the ideas sharper, since you’re clear about what your objective is.

CHRIS: This is the result of 25 years of reading Cather, talking about Cather, and wanting to do this project, I think, for quite some time.

Q: Why is Willa Cather an AMERICAN MASTER, and why now?

JOEL: But I think the reason that it’s important to us now is the pace of change is so fast in our society that we are all on the frontier of ourselves. We are all immigrants and migrants to new areas and new territories, and the only way to approach that is to grow and change and adapt. And Cather has many great lessons for that. And I think that her story of the pioneer, the kind of courage and vision it takes to stand on a new frontier — the frontier of ourselves, if you want to think of it that way — and adapt and change and grow, there’s never a better time than now to tell that story.

CHRIS: And why now. I mean, Willa Cather’s still a strong, strong woman. I mean, we’re living in a society with strong women. But she stands out even today because she did exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She made up her mind as a child she was going to be someone important. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to do to make her name. She was going to be a doctor and then later on a writer, but she knew that she wasn’t going to settle for the woman’s role of being married and having a family and you know, being — playing second fiddle to anyone else. She was going to be Willa Cather. And she succeeded and she’s a huge inspiration to women today.

Q: Explain the process of funding CATHER.

JOEL: One of the things the National Endowment can do is fund things that aren’t clearly commercial. If you think of people like James Dean, Clint Eastwood, big stars who already have a good audience, it’s easier to get funding for those projects. But for people who, like Willa Cather who are very interesting and very worthwhile, but don’t have that kind of commercial appeal, it’s a perfect match for the National Endowment for the Humanities. And they were the major funder on this project.

Q: What is the meaning behind the title of the documentary, WILLA CATHER — THE ROAD IS ALL?

CHRIS: The end is nothing, the road is all. We had a heck of a time coming up with the title for this program. And that ended up being the title. It’s one of Cather’s favorite sayings. I don’t know if she actually came up with that saying herself. I’m not really sure what the source of it is, but I do know what it means, and what it means is “live in the moment — look at what’s around you.” And she learned that from being a pioneer. I mean, when you arrive in a brand-new landscape, a place you’ve never, never been before, where there’s no trees, there’s no houses, there’s no neighbors, all you see is land all around you, you have to kind of reinvent yourself. You have to look around and see what’s there and take the moment as it is. And I think that’s what she learned from coming to Nebraska as a very young child.

Q: What did you learn about Cather that surprised you?

CHRIS: When I read her life story and studied her life story and then read her books, there were many, many places where they were one and the same. It was a documentary that I was reading. Certainly that’s true of MY ANTONIA. And others were thinly veiled Willa Cather. They were perhaps not Willa Cather as a person, but they were her experience, her emotional experience. The professor in THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE, who’s written historical novels and is sitting in his room and thinking, “Is there life beyond this? What does my future hold?” — Willa Cather was in the exact same place in her life when she wrote that book. So she was using her novels as a way of both remembering what had happened to her and to the people around her and a way of working out her own personal anguish, and that surprised me. I didn’t realize how deep that went.

JOEL: The other thing I learned about Cather was in reading her letters you find a vulnerable person and a more real person, a more human person than you find in her prose. There’s something about her prose, and even her official presence, when she spoke to groups and said other things, there was always this kind of formal veil. And you read some of her letters and you realize that she had petty jealousies. That she had personal concerns about her life. And I think that’s why Chris starts the program with Cather being somewhat mysterious, is Cather wanted to control her image. She wanted to control how she was perceived, and in reading some of her letters, which we quote from, you start to see a little bit behind the veil and get a sense of somebody who I actually like a little better than the formal Willa Cather, which is a vulnerable, more human Cather.

Q: For years, scholars and readers have speculated about Cather’s sexual orientation. How did WILLA CATHER — THE ROAD IS ALL address that question?

JOEL: I think it was one of the biggest challenges of the program, was to deal with the sexuality, because there were some who felt very strongly that Cather was at least bisexual, perhaps homosexual. And then we had one biographer who thought that she was very definitely a heterosexual.

CHRIS: We don’t know. We don’t have really a clue as to what Cather did or didn’t do in bed. So really, there wasn’t anything that we could say that was definitive, so we decided to simply ask our interview subjects, and they came through with flying colors. I mean, they said it all. And they said it with complexity and they said it with mystery and they leave the question open, which is where I think it belongs.

Q: Discuss the popularity and legacy of Cather’s work with the critics, the public, and among her peers.

JOEL: It was interesting for me to discover how big she was in her time. She was on the cover of TIME magazine in 1934 and had the most widely read novel in the country at the time, SHADOWS ON THE ROCK, which was not her greatest work. And it’s like a lot of artists, they’re discovered late in their career, but I’m sure it encouraged people to go back and re-read some of her works. I think Cather’s going through a renaissance right now and she’s starting to recapture some of that glow from the earlier time. And I think it’s for what we’ve talked about earlier: the pioneer experience is a very contemporary experience. We’re not on the frontier physically in terms of landscape, but we’re on the frontier of pioneering our own futures, and people like to see how people deal with that frontier experience. Where the past is no sure guide to the future. Where you have to improvise. Where you have to create. And Cather’s stories about people with courage and vision are a perfect metaphor for our times.

CHRIS: Well, Cather herself said that she didn’t think a book could be considered great until it had been out for at least a hundred years, because you just don’t know. I mean, the best-seller of today is forgotten tomorrow and Willa Cather’s work is not a hundred years old, but it’s getting there.

JOEL: It’s pretty close.

CHRIS: Yeah. And it’s still with us. And as her books come into public domain, movies are made, even though she wouldn’t have liked that, but the fact is she’s still there in our consciousness and she still has quite a lot to teach us. And I think that the hundred-year test is going to work for Cather. She’ll still be here in a hundred years. She’ll still be here in 200 years. And how many authors can you say that about? She wasn’t popular with the critics in her later years, but the public was still reading her. And as Joel said, you know, her books were still best-sellers and you know, she was still beloved by her readers, and I think that’s been always true for Willa Cather. You know, readers love her books, and always have. And the critical acclaim has gone up and down, but they keep reading her.

JOEL: F. Scott Fitzgerald idolized Cather and he wrote her glowing notes. She was one of the big figures when he was just beginning his writing and so I think she was very active among the big boys at the time, and it’s wonderful that in this series, the AMERICAN MASTERS series, we’re going to see F. Scott Fitzgerald, then Cather, and then Hemingway.

CHRIS: Well, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired by Willa Cather’s A LOST LADY and based his Daisy in THE GREAT GATSBY on that characterization that Willa Cather wrote. So yeah, I mean, the big guys liked Cather for the most part, although as Joel said, they were threatened by her. I think she liked their work. She just simply didn’t want to be put in a ghetto of women writers. She wanted to be considered a writer, a great writer, just like everybody else. She didn’t want to have a special tag put on her. And I think she got her wish.

JOEL: The top-10 lists of writers in America by year, actually 1905, 1906, 1907, you read those top-10 lists and you don’t recognize nine out of the 10 people. Here Willa Cather’s on the list ,and who are these other nine people? You’ve never heard of them, which is a sign that she was popular in her time, but that her work has also endured. And it helped me see, when I look at the top 10 novels today and some of the mystery writers and romance writers and action writers, it won’t even register a hundred years from now. Cather will register a hundred years from now.

Q: What do you think Willa Cather would have thought about this documentary?

CHRIS: I don’t think you could make a program about Willa Cather’s life that would satisfy Willla Cather. No matter what you said, it wouldn’t be what she wanted you to say. She’s a very controlling person. And secondly, she hated the media. She hated movies. She would have hated television the way it is today and would have probably never watched it, probably wouldn’t have had one in her apartment. So I mean, even if we made the greatest biography of Willa Cather possible, I think Willa Cather would have hated it.

JOEL: If anybody asked her what she thought of it, she would say that “They have no right to delve into my life like this. They have no right to interpret. They have no right to bring all these people together and examine my life. They should read my works. That’s what’s important.” But I think just as she’s falling asleep at night, she’d be so satisfied that she was getting all the attention. So I think she’d be of two minds about it.

Q: Any final thoughts for viewers of this program?

CHRIS: What would I like people to take from watching this program? Well, first of all, just the courage to spend your life finding your own voice, which is what she taught us through her life. And second, the desire to go out and read a Willa Cather book.

JOEL: With each new novel, Cather didn’t repeat herself. She took on new challenges and said new things. And that’s such an inspiration for any of us, is that you can find certain tricks in life that you repeat and help you get through, but to really be alive and to be in the moment, you have to create a new future. And what an inspiration Cather was for that.

“No romantic novel ever written in
America, by man or woman, is one
half so beautiful as MY ANTONIA.”
– H. L. Mencken

In the mid-1970s, not long after I had moved from New York City to Lemmon, South Dakota, I attended a 90th birthday party for a woman who had been one of the original homesteaders in the area, having immigrated from Sweden with her parents in 1909. The Lutheran church basement was decorated with crepe-paper streamers, and one table held family photographs — color snapshots of the great-grandchildren, wedding photographs from the 1950s, daguerreotypes of stern-faced ancestors in the Old Country. Most of the woman’s children were in attendance; I knew the ones who ranched in the area, but not those who had moved on to Oregon, Washington, California. In the course of our conversation, my husband asked her how many children she’d had, and the woman laughed nervously and said, “Oh, dear, I don’t remember. Some died so young. Sixteen, maybe … 14. Eleven lived.”

Such stories seem anachronistic in present-day America, but the monumental rigors of pioneer life are still a vivid memory for many on the Plains. Willa Cather’s MY ANTONIA is about the hardy people who risked their lives and fortunes in a harsh new land; Cather had the great good fortune to have lived among the first generation of white settlers in 1880s Nebraska, and she gives witness to their time and place in such a way that American literature will never forget them. MY ANTONIA, following O PIONEERS! (1913) and THE SONG OF THE LARK (1915), completes the trilogy of Cather’s best-known Nebraska novels. Critic H. L. Mencken thought MY ANTONIA to be the most accomplished and, reviewing it in 1919, shortly after it was published, he wrote, “Her style has lost self-consciousness; her feeling for form has become instinctive. And she has got such a grip upon her materials. … I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the Western prairies more real … and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing.”

It was risky, in the early part of this century, to presume to write fiction about ordinary, rough-hewn people engaged in the rigors of dry land farming in frontier Nebraska. The prevailing literary style was for overrefined, predictable, plot-driven novels with characters who held fast to European pretensions and standards of gentility. Along with writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather was seen by some contemporary critics as an answered prayer. Writing about O PIONEERS!, which had established Cather’s national reputation when it appeared in 1913, one critic stated, “Here at last is an American novel, redolent of the Western prairies.”

Louise Bogan, who termed Cather an American classic in THE NEW YORKER, treasured the authority of Cather’s voice, her having “learned all there was to know about the prairie, including how to kill rattlesnakes and how prairie dogs built their towns.” Above all, Bogan praised Cather for not being one of those “writers of fiction who compromised with their talents and their material in order to amuse or soothe an American business culture.” Refreshed by Cather’s evocation of pioneer life, Bogan said admiringly that Cather “used her powers … in practicing fiction as one of the fine arts.”

Cather herself complained in a 1922 essay that “the novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished.” Intent on telling the truths of a particular time and place, she made her own prose as spare as the land about which she was writing, and became a pioneer in American fiction. While Europe figures in MY ANTONIA as a lost Eden, or a repository of terrible secrets that haunts the immigrants in their new land, the novel is solidly grounded in America, its language the uncluttered idiom of the farmers and townspeople of Webster County, Nebraska. For example, young rural women in Boston or New York who moved into town to earn wages to help support their families on the farms were commonly called “servants.” Cather, however, knew that in Nebraska they were called “hired girls,” and that’s what she calls them in MY ANTONIA.

Cather’s Nebraska novels vibrate not only with the spoken language of ordinary people but also with the visual images that help a reader truly to see a place. In MY ANTONIA Cather moves smoothly and spectacularly from the small detail to an exalted vision of the landscape and its possibilities. Not long after 10-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska, having been orphaned in Virginia, he mulls over his grandmother’s solemn instruction never to go to the garden without a stick for clubbing rattlesnakes. Then he muses: “Alone, I should never have found the garden. … I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away … if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”

Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, near the town of Winchester, Virginia, in the North Neck region of the state, where her ancestors had farmed since the late 18th century. She was the first of seven children. Cather was nine when her family moved to Nebraska, following her father’s parents and his brother, who had emigrated to the frontier during the 1870s. Cather’s family left behind a large and prosperous farm, a house that Cather remembered as roomy and cheerful, and, of course, the lush foliage of Virginia. Her family settled on a farm near Red Cloud, Nebraska, which had been founded in 1870, and by the time Willa Cather arrived, it had a population of about 1,000, a school, and a small opera house.

The near-treeless countryside could not have been less like Virginia, and the drastic change took a toll on the young Willa Cather. In a newspaper interview following the publication of O PIONEERS!, Cather said that the new landscape had evoked a sense of “erasure of personality.” In MY ANTONIA, Jim Burden says of his first glimpse of Nebraska, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” During the 20-mile trip by horse-drawn wagon from town to his grandparents’ farm, Jim looks out at the starry night and says of his deceased parents, “I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not where. … Between that earth and sky I felt erased, blotted out.”

Jim Burden serves Cather well as a narrator of the land. As he is settling in with his grandparents, he notes with wonder that theirs is the only wooden house for miles around, and that their neighbors live in houses made of sod. His sense of being obliterated by the landscape remains strong: “Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy red grass, most if it as tall as I.” But he begins to find beauty in the sea of grass, its red “the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” In an elegant phrase that became Cather’s epitaph — it is etched on her tombstone — Burden comes to accept the power of the land over him, asserting, “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

Cather said in a 1921 interview that the years from eight to 15were particularly formative in any writer’s life; clearly, for her, it was the experience of moving to Nebraska and absorbing its pioneer culture that first inspired her as a writer and gave us the most beloved of her novels. At the age of 11 Cather obtained employment delivering mail to the farms around Red Cloud, which gave her unparalleled access to the talk and the lives of her immigrant neighbors. The knowledge she gained about them, however, set her apart from the other English-speaking settlers. In a 1923 essay entitled “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” she says of her own people that they were kind to their neighbors from Europe but also “provincial and utterly without curiosity” about the Old World cultures from which these people had come. MY ANTONIA reveals the subtle ironies of a social milieu in which, as noted in Doris Grumbach’s 1988 foreword to this novel, the Czechs, Swedes, and Norwegians “were looked down upon for their poverty but were lonely for a culture which was, in many cases, richer than their American neighbors’.”

Antonia Shimerda’s father is a tragic case in point. A cultured man, a violinist, he cannot bear the weight of the hardships he encounters in Nebraska — living with his family in a crude dugout and taking turns wearing the one overcoat they own. Lacking the skills to manage a farm, he clings pathetically to his Old World wardrobe, emerging from the earthen dugout in a coat and “a knitted grey vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral pin.” Mr. Shimerda was a common type among Plains homesteaders. My own great-grandfather Heyward, a proper Englishman, once refused to evacuate a South Dakota parsonage that was on fire until he was fully dressed.

Jim Burden notes that Antonia is the only one of the Shimerda family “who could rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live.” When Jim examines a gun brought over from the Old Country, he finds Mr. Shimerda looking at him with “his faraway look that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well.” Jim senses that his grandmother, too, is “so often thinking of things that were far away.” This homesickness is an important link between the native-born American homesteaders and the more recent immigrants; it helps them bridge their differences. When Shimerda, overcome by emotion, suddenly kneels and prays before the Burdens’ Christmas tree, Jim’s grandfather somewhat nervously bows his head, “thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.” After Shimerda has taken his leave, thanking the Burdens and blessing Jim with the sign of the cross, Jim’s grandfather tells him simply, “ŒThe prayers of all good people are good.’”

This scene underscores a reality of frontier existence: circumstances of deprivation and isolation often deprive prejudice of the ignorance and distrust that it needs in order to thrive. By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was active on the Plains, preaching a virulent anti-Catholicism, but in both O PIONEERS! and MY ANTONIA, Cather offers us a glimpse of a more innocent time. Even now, in the remotest places on the Plains, places that the larger society does not notice or care about, I’ve found that country people can often bridge cultural gaps with ease; they know that theological or ideological distinctions matter far less than the needs of the people at hand.

In writing about a novel such as MY ANTONIA, which has long been considered a classic of American literature, I am temped to play the devil’s advocate and ask a simple question, one that any 15-year-old assigned to read the novel might ask: Why read it NOW? What possible relevance can it have for life in urban, postmodern America? One can point, of course, to the many small delights of observation that give the book its rich texture, the “nimble air” of spring that releases the settlers from the fierce grip of winter, or Burden’s observation that on a quiet night “it seemed as if we could hear the corn growing … under the stars one caught a faint crackling … where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green.” There are also people we recognize: the suspicious Mrs. Shimerda, unable to recognize that what she considers her peasant canniness is a self-defeating form of paranoia; the pompous and cruel Wick Cutter, “full of moral maxims for boys,” who rapes his hired girls; and the hateful Mrs. Cutter, whom Cather describes, memorably, as having a face “the very colour and shape of anger.”

But MY ANTONIA also holds an important place in American immigrant fiction; it taps into a communal sense of America as an admixture of rich heritages. Many people now alive, my own family included, share the story of the English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants who came to the Great Plains by way of New England or Virginia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I suspect that Willa Cather would be fascinated by contemporary novels about more recent immigrants by the Asian-American and Hispanic writers who are currently enriching American literature. No doubt some of these writers have learned much from Cather about what it means, as a novelist, to have fidelity to a time and a place. MY ANTONIA concerns, as do many of these recent books, coming of age in a new place and culture; it also explores childhood affections, dreams once held dear, in the light of an adult awareness of displacement. Cather herself epitomizes an all too American displacement; her best writing years, including the period in which she wrote her first three Nebraska novels, were spent in New York City, where she had gone in 1906 to work as an associate editor at MCCLURE’S, one of the most popular magazines of the day.

In many ways the world of MY ANTONIA is still with us, a neglected but significant part of America. While Cather witnessed the drastic changes that were occurring on the Plains in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, from the first to the second and third generations of immigrants, a writer now living on the Plains would note another kind of change: like most small towns in the region, Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska, has been losing population ever since she wrote about it. Its population surged to nearly 2,000 in the 1890s, and is down to some 1,131 people today.

In a prophetic 1923 essay on Nebraska, Willa Cather noted with unease that the children of the immigrants, the second generation to farm the Plains, “were reared amid hardships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be very much interested in material comfort, in buying whatever is expensive and ugly.” She saw rural Nebraskans succumbing to the enticements of manufacture, the beginnings of a consumer society, and commented, “The generation now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long cornrows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-made: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure.” She wonders if the generations of the future will be fooled. Will they believe, she asks, “that to live easily is to live happily?” A relevant question for any thoughtful person in a consumer society, but one that has special resonance for those who still farm and ranch on the Great Plains and ponder the transition from families engaged in agriculture to corporations practicing agribusiness.

The cities of America contain a Great Plains diaspora, full of people who, like Jim Burden, left the small towns and farms of their youth for an easier life, who felt that they had to leave in order to make their way in the world. Like him, they are haunted by the past and by the painful ambiguities of their relationships with the friends and relatives who remained on the land. A lawyer in Fargo, North Dakota, the first in his family to graduate from college, told me recently that his family back in western North Dakota was enormously proud of his success, and would never forgive him for leaving. I picture this diaspora as people distractedly watching CNN in city apartments, but containing deep within themselves a vision of the long, “sunflower-bordered roads” in farm country that had seemed to Jim Burden “the roads to freedom.”

The doctrinaire socialist and Marxist critics of the 1930s came to see Cather’s work (as well as that of Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other writers depicting small-town America) as reactionary. Granvillle Hicks, in a devastating piece entitled “The Case against Willa Cather,” decries her turning away from “contemporary life as it is,” which he clearly envisions to be “our industrial civilization.” His argument holds only if you are willing to dismiss the rural and small-town people of the Great Plains as unreal or irrelevant, to see their lives as not worthy of a writer’s attention, an attitude long prevalent in American literature which has only recently begun to change.

It is precisely Cather’s allegiance to her subject, her thoroughly realistic picture of the lives of Nebraska homesteaders even as she employs what one critic derisively termed “heroic idealism,” that makes MY ANTONIA so remarkable. Her famous image of a plow, “magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, [standing] out against the sun,” is anything but romantic when taken in the context of Antonia Shimerda’s difficult life. Visiting her after an absence of 20 years, after tragedies and disappointments have come to them both, Jim Burden finds Antonia at the center of a thriving family, enormously proud of the fruit orchards she has brought out of nothing. The reader knows what her victories have cost her, and stands amazed with Burden as he says, “Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

Cather’s depiction in MY ANTONIA of the situation of rural and small-town women constitutes another form of realism that many of her contemporary critics missed. The vulnerability of young women, especially poor country girls, to sexual betrayal, to scandal and censure in late-19th-century society, informs much of the book. Cather also makes a sophisticated commentary on the distinctions that began to emerge between country people and town people in her youth. Burden’s disappointment with town life, where “the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched,” in comparison to life on the farms surely reflects Cather’s own experience. When she was 12 years old, her family moved from their unsuccessful farm to Red Cloud, where her father set up a loan and mortgage business.

Cather’s nonconformity was much gossiped about in Red Cloud — she frequently dressed in men’s clothing and had the outlandish ambition to become a doctor; she also studied Latin in her attic study. Like Antonia, who had thought nothing of having Jim feel the biceps she’d developed from doing heavy labor on the farm, Cather did not hesitate to work outdoors in “a man’s job” — delivering mail on horseback. On moving into town, she, like Jim Burden, no doubt noted with scorn that a town girl’s soft muscles “seemed to ask but one thing — not to be disturbed.” When Jim describes the “guarded mode of existence” in town as “like living under a tyranny,” he speaks a truth about humanity that we know all too well in the late 20th century. The well-guarded conformity of the many not only stifles the independent spirit, it can destroy it. This aspect of the novel may offer a guide to placing MY ANTONIA in the current debate on diversity in American culture.

“Practicing fiction” proved to be Cather’s means of survival, her way through a world that both rewarded and castigated her intelligence and independent spirit. Critics have often commented on the fact that Jim Burden, in many senses, stands in for Willa Cather: she, too, came to Nebraska from Virginia as a child; she, too, eventually lived and worked in New York City. Cather’s appropriation of a male narrator was considered daring at the time. In recent years some feminist critics have called it reactionary; others have termed it a liberating act in the days before American women even had the right to vote. I see it as a splendid subversion, amplified in MY ANTONIA by Cather’s creation of strong, memorable female characters.

It has less often been noted that Cather also incorporated large elements of herself into Antonia, a character known to be based on Cather’s childhood friend from the Nebraska countryside, Annie Pavelka. Cather was a notorious tomboy, and surely Antonia reflects Cather’s sentiments when she says, “Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!” She tells Jim, “I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.” But it is worth noting, too, as it says much about Cather’s genius for creating a believable, late-19th-century frontier woman, that Antonia also pursues motherhood with the same innocent vigor. In some ways MY ANTONIA is a perfect illustration of Virginia Woolf’s insight that all writers must be androgynous, willing and able to express both the male and the female. With Jim and Antonia, Cather is “practicing fiction” at the highest level, inventing characters who are like her and not like her, who are and are not their real-life models.

The bold curiosity and independent spirit that did not gain Cather approval in Red Cloud society is of course necessary for an artist, and it is likely that her scorn for the popular art of what she called “adjective and sentimentality” made Willa Cather unpopular with peers and elders alike. The frustrations of Cather’s teenage years in Red Cloud seem to have found release in the columns she wrote for the NEBRASKA STATE JOURNAL from 1893 to 1896, when she was a student at the University of Nebraska. An 1894 piece all but scorches the page: “The Bohemians make large pretensions, it’s a part of their business. But they have great standards, that saves them. … In Philistia there are no standards and no gods. Each house has its own little new improved portable idol and could never be convinced that it was not just as good as any other idol. Here the great standards of art avail nothing.”

In an 1895 essay entitled “The Demands of Art,” Cather makes a revealing statement about the vulnerability of the artist. “When one comes to write,” she says, “all that you have been taught leaves you, all that you have stolen lies discovered. You are then a translator, without a lexicon, without notes. … You have then to give voice to the hearts of men, and you can do it only so far as you have known them, loved them. It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel.” Cather was then 17 years away from publishing her first novel; she would spend 10 years in Pittsburgh teaching high school and working as a journalist before moving to New York. There she had more hack work ahead of her at MCCLURE’S before the advice of another woman writer, Sarah Orne Jewett, would take hold in her. “You must find a quiet place,” Jewett wrote Cather in 1908. “You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that.”

Louise Bogan puts Willa Cather’s achievement in perspective when she writes approvingly that while Cather’s first novel, ALEXANDER’S BRIDGE, opens in Boston, her second, O PIONEERS!, begins with a scene of a high gale in Nebraska. “For Miss Cather, the wind was at last blowing in the right direction,” Bogan concludes. “From then on … she remembered Nebraska.” A large part of that remembering for Cather meant calling forth in herself that love she had spoken of in her youthful manifesto on the demands of writing, but it took her some time to shed her self-consciousness and to develop the artistic mastery that H. L. Mencken found so striking in MY ANTONIA.

Even more than in MY ANTONIA, the land itself is the main character of O PIONEERS!, but in Cather’s second Nebraska novel, THE SONG OF THE LARK, it figures hardly at all; instead, Cather takes a hard look at what it takes for a woman artist to emerge from the constrictions of small-town society. Its heroine, the ambitious and resourceful Thea Kronborg, pursues her career as a singer despite a disapproving family and men who underestimate her. Her triumph is singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In MY ANTONIA, as Cather returns to rural Nebraska, she contrasts it not only with local small-town society but also with the larger world that the railroad reaches. The heroic vision of the first generation of Nebraska homesteaders that marks O PIONEERS! has been tempered by Cather’s wariness of the “progress” that came barreling along with the advent of the 20th century. A sense of loss permeates the novel, the sense that, as Cather wrote in 1923, in Nebraska, “the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and … no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun.”

The epigraph from Virgil that Jim Burden employs as a motto for recounting his childhood friendship with Antonia in the Nebraska countryside — “Optima dies … prima fugit” (The best days are the first to flee) — epitomizes the elegiac tone of the novel, and helps to explain the way the book unfolds. Episodic rather than plot-driven, MY ANTONIA is a continual revelation of stories that linger in the memory. In many ways the novel is a perfect evocation of childhood. The task for Jim Burden in recounting the past is not to dwell in it, but to use it to celebrate the present, however reluctantly. The reader comes to understand that both Jim and Antonia have done well not to triumph over circumstance but to keep both memory and hope alive within its bounds.

The task for Cather, as novelist, is to describe the past in such a way that it is truly evoked, with a minimum of nostalgia or sentimentality. This she does in part by making indelible the vigor, the very voice of Antonia Shimerda; we see Antonia running barefoot in her garden, gripping plow handles behind a team of horses, gathering her children to her side. “We all liked Tony’s stories,” Jim Burden tells us, adding that “her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.” Perhaps the memory is so vivid to the grown-up Jim because he hears so little anymore that is from the heart. As a successful legal counsel for the railroad, long settled into a disappointing marriage, Jim has learned not to expect so much from those around him.

But his friendship with Antonia remains, and it is one that might strike the modern American reader as something of a miracle. In our mobile society, not many of us can lay claim to such lifelong relationships. I find it significant that Cather’s Nebraska masterpiece has such a friendship at the heart of it, a remarkable friendship between a man and a woman of different cultures and classes, a childhood affection that helps the adult Antonia and Jim reconcile themselves to Nebraska, to the past, and to life itself. “You really are a part of me,” Jim confesses, almost despite himself, at his reunion with Antonia after a lengthy separation. Wisely, he and Cather let Antonia sum it up: “She turned her bright, believing eyes to me and the tears came up in them slowly. How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we were little.’”

To order a copy of Willa Cather: The Road is All, please visit the American Masters Shop.

In writing INVISIBLE MAN in the late 1940s, Ralph Ellison brought onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate — the consequences of a society that oppressed them — Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware. Ellison’s view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in INVISIBLE MAN comes upon a yam seller (named Petie Wheatstraw, after the black folklore figure) on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation “I yam what I yam!” is Ellison’s expression of embracing one’s culture as the way to freedom.

If Wright’s protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison’s more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A “frontier” state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the 1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were “among the poorest” in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those “who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day.”

Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the variegated culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in INVISIBLE MAN. The novel references African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz, and black traditions like playing the dozens — much as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical Western and Eastern civilization in THE WASTELAND and ULYSSES. An added difference for Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own and the black identity — as well as a roadmap for anyone experiencing themselves as “invisible,” unseen. “Time” magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”

For Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison’s view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence — including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to “tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.

In his own life, Ellison’s interests were as far ranging as his “integrative” imagination. He was expert at fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. His haberdasher in New York said that he “knew more about textiles than anyone I’ve ever met,” and his friend Saul Bellow called him a “thoroughgoing expert on the raising of African violets.” He was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, and photographer. The scope of Ellison’s mind and vision may have contributed to the growing unwieldiness of his much-awaited second novel, which he toiled over for forty years. He planned it as three books, a saga that would encompass the entire American experience. The book was still unfinished when Ellison died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty.

INVISIBLE MAN and the essays in SHADOW AND ACT and GOING TO THE TERRITORY were transformative in our thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be American. On the power of three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary project and helped define and clarify arguments about race in this country. Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. The universality and accomplishment of Ellison’s writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all of us.

Resources

Novels and Essays by Ralph Ellison

INVISIBLE MAN, 1952 (novel)
SHADOW AND ACT, 1964 (essays)
GOING TO THE TERRITORY, 1985 (anthology of interviews, essays, and more)
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON, 1995 (John Callahan, ed.)
JUNETEENTH (1999) (novel)

Selected Essays and Reviews

Albert Murray, THE OMNI-AMERICANS (1970)
Robert G. O’Meally, THE CRAFT OF ELLISON (1980)
Benston, ed., SPEAKING FOR YOU: RALPH ELLISON’S CULTURAL VISION
Jerry Watts, HEROISM AND THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL: RALPH ELLISON, POLITICS, AND AFRO-AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE (1994)

A DVD of “Ralph Ellison: An American Journey”, containing an additional hour of video commentary and analysis can be purchased from California Newsreel.

Dashiell Hammett was born on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1894. The second of three children, he dropped out of school at the age of thirteen. He worked a succession of low-paying jobs including freight clerk, railroad laborer, messenger boy, and stevedore. In 1915 he began working on and off as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency. In less than ten years he would be turning these experiences into some of the most popular detective stories of his time. Unlike the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels, Hammett’s less-than-glamorous realism transformed the genre into a serious response to the urban culture of the times.

Hammett spent his early twenties working as a detective in San Francisco before enlisting in the army during World War I. He became a sergeant in the Motor Ambulance Corp, where he contracted tuberculosis. Upon returning from the service, he realized that his ailing health made it impossible to continue as a detective. Quitting the agency, he tried his hand at writing. His first story was published in 1922 by the upscale society magazine THE SMART SET. His new gritty style of detective story, however, was better suited to the pulp crime magazines of the time. In 1923, one of the most popular, BLACK MASK, published his story “Arson Plus.”

For the next several years Hammett would hone his skills as a storyteller in the pages of BLACK MASK. There he introduced a nameless character referred to only as “the Continental Op.” This down-to-earth operative working for the Continental Detective Agency was the antithesis of the glamorous all-knowing investigators that made up much of the detective genre. The “Op,” with his rough speech and matter-of-fact attitude, was incredibly popular. In 1928 he wrote a full-length novel with the “Op,” incorporating much of what he had seen at the Pinkerton Agency. RED HARVEST was a psychological thriller narrated in a voice both penetrating and off-the-cuff. It was the raw, unadorned style of Red Harvest that would come to be known as “hard boiled.” Within a year Hammett published his second book, THE DAIN CURSE. By 1930 he had built a strong following, and decided to branch out with a new character.

For his next novel, Hammett created Sam Spade, a rough and solitary man who worked outside of the law. This independent detective made his first appearance in what was to become Hammett’s most famous book, THE MALTESE FALCON (1930). A story of greed and betrayal, THE MALTESE FALCON went into seven printings in its first year. In the 1941 movie version Humphrey Bogart played a reluctant, yet idealistic detective who epitomized the “hard boiled” hero. He tackled society’s corruption with an unyielding search for the truth, and a lack of concern for what it took to find it.

Hammett followed THE MALTESE FALCON a year later with THE GLASS KEY, a story of political intrigue focused on the social relations of the rich and the corruption of power. The New York Times described it as combining “the tradition of Sherlock Holmes with the style of Ernest Hemingway.” His new-found fame brought him into contact with a number of writers, including Ernest Hemingway. That same year he began a tempestuous affair with the playwright, Lillian Hellman. Hellman was strong, witty, intelligent and socially connected. Their affair introduced him to the thrilling new world of high society. To Hellman’s dismay, Hammett continued his life-long habits of excessive drinking and womanizing. Though their thirty year affair was often rocky, the two remained friends throughout Hammett’s life.

By the mid-thirties Hammett was at the height of his fame. No longer struggling to pay the rent, he moved to Hollywood and lived within the exclusive world of the Hollywood elite. In 1934 he published THE THIN MAN, which portrayed an ex-detective reluctantly investigating a disappearance. At the center of the story was a couple living a liquor-soaked open marriage. Scandalous for the times, THE THIN MAN, was repeatedly censored, but remained Hammett’s greatest commercial success. After THE THIN MAN, Hammett worked for the major studios re-writing other people’s scripts. Though he would continue to write for radio during the forties, THE THIN MAN was to be his final novel.

For the remainder of his life, Hammett dedicated himself to left-wing political involvement and the defense of civil liberties. During World War II, at the age of forty-eight, Hammett enlisted as a private in the army. Three years later he was honorably discharged as a sergeant. Leaving the army, he began to teach writing in New York at a Marxist institute. It was then that Hammett’s political integrity would be challenged. As the president of New York Civil Rights Congress, Hammett had posted bail for a group of communists on trial for conspiracy. When they jumped bail, Hammett was jailed for refusing to give the names of the sources of the bail money. After serving five months in prison, he was let out, only to find that the IRS was charging him with one hundred thousand dollars in back taxes.

Hammett spent the last ten years of his life in a small rural cottage in Katonah, New York. No longer at the center of the literary world, he continued to drink heavily in isolation. In 1955 he suffered a heart attack, and died six years later in New York City. Though his output was limited to only five novels, Hammett remains one of the most influential writers of his time. His introduction of the “hard-boiled” genre has had a profound effect on both television and the movies, and his uncompromisingly vernacular prose has influenced generations of writers as diverse as Raymond Chandler and William Burroughs.