9780803263321
Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art share button
Willa Cather
Format Paperback
Dimensions 0.36 (w) x 5.00 (h) x 8.00 (d)
Pages 156
Publisher University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date January 1988
ISBN 9780803263321
Book ISBN 10 0803263325
About Book
"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created." This famous observation appears in Willa Cather on Writing, a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity, about her own fiction and that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Mansfield, among others. She concludes, "Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all—no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself—a game of make-believe, of re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it."
Reviews

New York Times

"[Willa Cather] is saying the most interesting, most profound things about the art of writing, and the life of art, that have been said in our time certainly, and she does it with immense grace and dignity."—Katherine Anne Porter, New York Times

— Katherine Anne Porter

Nation

"Like her novels…her criticism has an impeccable distinction of style—it is a criticism démeublé, uncluttered by jargon or pedantry."—Nation

New York Times - Katherine Anne Porter

"[Willa Cather] is saying the most interesting, most profound things about the art of writing, and the life of art, that have been said in our time certainly, and she does it with immense grace and dignity."—Katherine Anne Porter, New York Times

New York Times

"[Willa Cather] is saying the most interesting, most profound things about the art of writing, and the life of art, that have been said in our time certainly, and she does it with immense grace and dignity."

—Katherine Anne Porter, New York Times

Nation

"Like her novels…her criticism has an impeccable distinction of style—it is a criticism démeublé, uncluttered by jargon or pedantry."

Katherine Anne Porter

[Willa Cather] is saying the most interesting, most profound things about the art of writing, and the life of art, that have been said in our time certainly, and she does it with immense grace and dignity.
New York Times