SOURCE: Thurin, Erik Ingvar. The Humanization of Willa Cather: Classicism in an American Classic, pp. 94–158, 320–30, 355–63. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Thurin presents an overview of Cather's debt to classical Greek and Latin literature in her short stories.

From Boldness to Conformity

The narrative technique that was to allow Cather to express herself both fully and adequately was not developed in a day. The stories to be discussed … all belong to a long exploratory apprenticeship which Cather served as a writer of fiction, roughly the period ending with the publication of her first novel.¹ A number of them were written during the time she was working as a journalist and composing her first poems; others are contemporary with the poems specifically written for the 1903 April Twilights, or those which she wrote or drafted during the immediately following years, before abandoning poetry. … [T]here is no particular...