"Why Willa Cather Revised "Paul's Case

IN a recent anthology of American short stories, editors have included Paul's Case, one of Willa Cather's earliest and best known short stories, many years . . . only one she would allow to be reprinted in anthologies or textbooks. 1 It is right and good that editors chose to reprint this story in a collection by which they intend to offer student of American literature the best of old and most promising among newest short stories by American authors.2 It is appropriate, furthermore, that editors should, in author headnote for Cather, call story naturalistic, and then go on to explain: story embodies concept that human fate is determined by interplay between inherited or inward traits and environment or outward circumstances. When inward and outward forces are in conflict, as they usually are in naturalistic fiction, character is doomed to suffer tragic consequences.3 This is, again, appropriate-to version of Paul's Case printed in The Troll Garden (1905), Cather's first collection of short stories. Yet when this story appeared again fifteen years after publication of The Troll Garden, in Youth and Bright Medusa (1920), Cather had progressed artistically

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• "Figuring Culture and Literacy in Willa Cather's "Paul's Case

  Janet Carey Eldred•Journal of Narrative and Life…•1993

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