the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt one)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

With that 1915 trip, the mold of her life was set. She was deep into middle age: forty-one. She had followed, as she calls it in “Old Mrs. Harris,” “the long road that leads to things unguessed at and unforeseeable.” She did not make of herself a myth, as had Whitman and Frost. Her life does not have the beautiful or dire shape of parable, like Emily Dickinson’s or Hart Crane’s (or Hemingway’s, for that matter). She was bedeviled by neither mental illness nor alcoholism nor any other occupational hazard. She grew to hate most of modernity, declaring in 1936 in a famous adage, that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” and that she belonged to the severed past. Perhaps not surprisingly, her later work reached back deeper and deeper into history, to the early French settlers of Quebec in Shadows on the Rock, to slaveholding Virginians in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. At the end of her life she was at work on a long story or perhaps a novel meant to take place in fourteenth-century Avignon.

How to dramatize the slow, steady fire she was? All scholars of Cather are indebted to Edith Lewis’s Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A Memoir, both from 1953. Also from 1953 is Edward Killoran Brown’s Willa Cather, the first biography. Two additional biographies on the shelf are noteworthy. There is, from 1987, Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress, a vast tabulation of the data. And there is Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, from 1986, which covers only the first half of the life.