In the following excerpt, Piacentino offers an interpretation of Cather's "Neighbour Rosicky," particularly with regard to the themes of Agrarianism. Piacentino also examines Cather's use of imagistic descriptions.

"Neighbour Rosicky," a story claimed to be "among the finest of Willa Cather's works," "a kind of pendant, or coda, to her classical pastoral My Antonia," was written in 1928, shortly after Cather's father's death, and became the first of three stories collected in Obscure Destinies (1932). This endearing story has been somewhat generally and briefly analyzed by several of Cather's critics, but no one has thoroughly examined its rich agrarian texture, even though a few commentators have hinted at its presence. David Daiches has properly observed that the story's "earthiness almost neutralizes its sentimentality, and the relation of the action to its context in agricultural life gives . . . [it] an elemental quality." [Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction, 1951] John H. Randall, noting...