I've been sort of truant about generating discussion, sorry. Took me awhile to get started. I'm about 100 pages in right now, how about the rest of you?
  posted by jnuh @ 5:21:00 PM

 
Introduction: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather was born in 1873 in Virginia. At the age of 10, she moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, a farming community populated mostly by European immigrants. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and became a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, while, at the same time, beginning to publish her own writing. Her first novels were mostly concerned with themes from her childhood: the frontier, pioneers (both men and women, but with a particular focus on women), immigration, etc.

In 1922, she published One of Ours, a novel about WWI, which won her the Pulitzer prize. This year also proved a turning point in Cather's writing. She told an interviewer that, for her, "the world broke in two." Cather feared the increasing urbanization and materialism in America. Her later novels focus on characters undergoing crises in their lives, related to their personal choices and/or their conflicts with society. These novels contrast modern society with spirituality and a connection with nature. At this time, Cather also joined the Episcopal church. (Although protestant, she had a great deal of admiration for the symbolism of the Catholic church, as you'll see in Death Comes).

Gender is also an issue in Cather's work, although not as much in Death Comes as in some of her other work. I did come across a biography of Cather that mentions her disdain for a great deal of writing by women and her opinion that most women were too sentimental to write poetry. (My study of Cather is, in part, what prompted my ideas about women writers/artists who don't wish to be associated with other women in their field.) As such, it is difficult to make Cather a feminist writer.

Anyway, there's a lot to discuss with Death Comes. I'll be dropping in with more info as we go along.
  posted by jnuh @ 10:24:00 PM

 
So here it is folks, the last day for Cat's Eye. Any final thoughts? Maybe Maire would like to talk a little about the physics stuff, we never really brought that up again. (I guess it wasn't as prominent as I expected it to be.) I have forty pages to finish today, but the rest of you seem to have clipped right along. Despite the slow reader I've become, I will still post an introduction to Death Comes for the Archbishop tomorrow (probably afternoon or something). Happy reading, everyone.

p.s. I nominate Alex Pile for best typo.


  posted by jnuh @ 2:53:00 PM