Willa Cather and the American Southwest

The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather’s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries still waiting to be made into [a] landscape. The seemingly sterile indifference of the desert landscape posed a particular challenge to Cather’s desire to find in all places evidence of human significance and cultural accomplishment. Here, historical cultural achievements were not immediately apparent and when found took Cather far from the European tradition that had formed her early works. Cather’s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Though critics have long been aware of the importance of the American Southwest to Cather, this volume focuses a sharp eye on how that landscape served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity. John N. Swift is a professor of English and comparative literary studies at Occidental College. He is the president of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Foundation. Joseph R. Urgo is a professor and the chair of the Department of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of In the Age of Distraction and Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration.