Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather

Abstract

IN THE 1920S WILLA CATHER ACHIEVED BOTH CRITICAL ACCLAIM AND POPULAR success. So confident was she of her ability to attract contemporary and future readers that in 1927 she asked her publisher Alfred Knopf for a one percent increase in her royalties for Death Comes for the Archbishop. Believing that this novel's reputation-and sales-would outlast her lifetime, she prophesied that someday Knopf's son would be paying royalties to her niece.' Cather's literary and economic faith in Death Comes for the Archbishop has been vindicated; considered one of her finest novels, the book continues to sell in paperback. But her literary reputation has not been maintained at the height it attained in the 1920s, when critics and reviewers deemed her a American novelist. During the 1930s and 1940s, she was increasingly subjected to attacks by reviewers who not only disliked novels like Shadows on the Rock (1931) and Lucy Gayheart (1935) but who also questioned her literary stature, arguing that she was a minor, not a major, writer. As Clifton Fadiman phrased it in a typical commentary that appeared in The Nation in 1932, Cather's intensifying preoccupation with the historical past might permanently transport her to regions where works of art may be created, but ones never, an unfortunate fate since the author of The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918) had not been a minor writer, but a one.2 Fadiman's assessment was prophetic. Although Cather has won a place in the American literary canon, it is not a high one; she has been considered an important writer and yet somehow not a major one, somehow not an equal colleague of Hawthorne, James, or Faulkner, and perhaps not even in the same realm as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Dreiser. Fadiman assumed that he and his fellow reviewers were merely recording,