Recognizing Willa Cather

L. Brent Bohlke, ed. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. xvii + 202 pp. Illus. James Woodress. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. xx + 583 pp. Sharon O'Brien. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. xvi + 464 pp. Susan J. Rosowski. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Gather's Romanticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. xvii + 284 pp. In several senses, the scholarly pursuit of a writer's life is a more demanding and consuming undertaking than an exercise in literary criticism. It certainly is more interesting to more people. With major writers, those demands upon the biographer increase significantly, for "major" as a label connotes not only authorial output but a complexity and elusiveness in the subject sufficient to draw and fascinate large numbers of readers. The biographer must search out a large body of material and gain some kind of command over, and impose some sort of order upon, the bulk of that Output; the sheer detective work of sniffing out pertinent and overlooked material and data can extend over years, even decades. At the same time, the biographer must rise above the data in order to establish his or her own position vis-à-vis both the subject and the shape to be given to that the subject's work. Will he be defendant or assassin? Will he hang his biographical garment on a thesis, a psychoanalytical theory, a cultural truism, a moral outlook, or an aesthetic premise? Faced with the opportunity to look with increasingly closer magnification at the work and life of his subject, what and how and in what way will he choose to see

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