Willa Cather (Essay Date 1931)

SOURCE: Cather, Willa. "My First Novels [There Were Two]." In On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art, pp. 91-7. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

In the following essay, originally published in The Colophon in 1931, Cather provides background information on the writing and publication of her first two novels.

My first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was very like what painters call a studio picture. It was the result of meeting some interesting people in London. Like most young writers, I thought a book should be made out of "interesting material," and at that time I found the new more exciting than the familiar. The impressions I tried to communicate on paper were genuine, but they were very shallow. I still find people who like that book because it follows the most conventional pattern, and because it is more or less laid in...