SOURCE: “The Personal Side of William Jennings Bryan,” in Prairie Schooner, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, Winter, 1949, pp. 331-7.

In the following essay, originally published in the July 14, 1900 issue of the periodical Library, Cather records her personal impressions of Bryan.

When I first knew William Jennings Bryan he was the Democratic nominee for the First Congressional district of Nebraska, a district in which the Republican majority had never fallen below 3,000. I was a student at the State University when Mr. Bryan was stumping the State, which he had stumped two years before for J. Sterling Morton, now his bitterest political enemy. My first meeting with him was on a street car. He was returning from some hall in the suburbs of Lincoln where he had been making an address, and carried a most unsightly floral offering of large dimensions, the tribute of some of his devoted constituents, half concealed by...