During the 1973 Willa Cather centennial seminar in Lincoln, Nebraska, Leon Edel--the Henry James biographer who collaborated with E. K. Brown on the first important biographical study of Cather--put himself "out on a limb" by announcing that "the time will come when [Cather will] be ranked above Hemingway. . . . But I've got her below Faulkner." Although arguable, Edel's statement accords with the recent explosion of interest in Cather and her fiction in contemporary scholarly circles as well as in high school and college classrooms. Cather has dominated American Western literary studies--as William Faulkner does Southern--for some time and is being recognized as an experimental modernist and a touchstone of twentieth-century American and world civilization. Her Jamesian commitment to fictional technique served thematic interests embracing immigration, cultural blending, and turn-of-the-century spiritual aridity, as well as a search for cosmic integrity that ultimately brought her, like Henry Adams, to medieval France.

Wilella...