Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) “The Novel Demeuble” (1922), 版權到期......THE SONG OF THE LARK. “Chasing Bright Medusas,”

 Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)     “The Novel Demeuble” (1922), 版權到期......THE SONG OF THE LARK.  “Chasing Bright Medusas,” 

The Library of America 

Willa Cather was born 151 years ago, on December 7, 1873.

She wrote 12 novels, 60 stories, and dozens of essays and newspaper articles. She is partly remembered for many of the strong women characters she created: Alexandra Bergson in "O Pioneers!," Ántonia Shimerda in "My Ántonia," Thea Kronborg in "The Song of the Lark."

Yet in her fiction, she often adopted a male point of view—and she often found herself defending the choice, which was unusual for a woman novelist at the time. When asked during an interview about Niel, the narrator of "A Lost Lady," she answered, “He isn't a character at all; he is just a peephole into that world. I am amused when people tell me he is a lovely character, when in reality he is only a point of view.”

"One of the people who interested me most as a child was the Bohemian hired girl of one of our neighbors, who was so good to me,” she explained when a reporter mentioned "My Ántonia" and its narrator, Jim Burden. “Then, I noticed that much of what I knew about Annie came from the talks I had with young men. She had a fascination for them, and they used to be with her whenever they could. They had to manage it on the sly, because she was only a hired girl. But they respected and admired her, and she meant a good deal to some of them. So I decided to make my observer a young man.”

“I did not for one minute try to ‘talk like a man,’” she wrote to one reader who had criticized her choice of narrator. “Such a thing as humbugging any one never occurred to me. It does not matter who tells a story. It is merely a point of view, a position which the writer takes in regard to his material; just as a painter must first decide what his position is to be in regard to whatever he is going to sketch.”

Sarah Orne Jewett, shortly before her death in 1909, suggested to Cather that one of her stories could have been written from a woman’s point of view—and might have been more interesting for it. Cather deeply admired Jewett and regarded her as a mentor, and their exchange of letters may well have been the inspiration to write “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” the first story she wrote after Jewett's death and one of Cather’s handful of works narrated from a woman’s point of view.

You can read “The Joy of Nelly Deane" at our Story of the Week site, along with an introduction describing Cather's brief friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/....../the-joy-of-nelly......

Illustration by Paul Julien Meylan for “The Joy of Nelly Deane” in the October 1911 issue of The Century.

美國圖書館·追蹤

5天·

威拉凱瑟 (Willa Cather) 出生於 151 年前的 1873 年 12 月 7 日。

她寫了 12 部小說、60 個故事以及數十篇散文和報紙文章。她因塑造的許多堅強的女性角色而被人們所銘記：《先驅者啊！爾達、《雲雀之歌》中的西亞‧克朗伯格。

然而，在她的小說中，她經常採用男性觀點，而且她經常發現自己在捍衛自己的選擇，這對當時的女性小說家來說是不尋常的。當在採訪中被問及《迷失的女士》的敘述者尼爾時，她回答說：“他根本不是一個角色；他只是那個世界的一個窺視孔。當人們告訴我他是一個可愛的角色時，我感到很有趣，而實際上他只是一個觀點。

當一名記者提到《我的安東妮亞》及其敘述者吉姆·伯登時，她解釋道：「小時候，我最感興趣的人之一是我們鄰居的一位波西米亞僱工女孩，她對我非常好。受僱的女孩，但他們尊重並欽佩她，她對他們中的一些人來說意義重大，所以我決定讓我的觀察員成為年輕人。

“我一分鐘都沒有嘗試‘像個男人一樣說話’，”她寫信給一位批評她選擇敘述者的讀者。 「我從來沒有想過欺騙任何人這樣的事情。誰講故事並不重要。這只是作者對其資料所採取的一種觀點和立場；就像畫家必須先決定他對於他要畫的任何東西的立場。

莎拉·奧恩·朱厄特 (Sarah Orne Jewett) 於 1909 年去世前不久，向凱瑟建議，她的一個故事可以從女性的角度來寫，而且可能會更有趣。凱瑟深深欽佩朱厄特，並將她視為導師，他們的書信往來很可能激發了她寫《內莉·迪恩的歡樂》的靈感，這是她在朱厄特去世後寫的第一個故事，也是凱瑟為數不多的以一個故事為背景的作品之一。

您可以在我們的本週故事網站上閱讀“內莉·迪恩的歡樂”，以及描述凱瑟與莎拉·奧恩·朱厄特短暫友誼的介紹：https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/ ..../the-內莉的喜悅…

Paul Julien Meylan 為《The Joy of Nelly Deane》繪製的插圖，發表在《世紀》雜誌 1911 年 10 月號。

Others might interpret her life’s journey differently, but a portrait this succinct relies on such sharp generalizations. Brevity exposes a writer’s attitudes; selection and emphasis — I’m thinking here especially of Willa Cather’s fiction — are everything. In a famous 1922 essay, “The Novel Démeublé,” she wrote: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed.”
Cather stated her credo of fiction most forcefully in her essay “The Novel Demeuble” (1922), meaning “The Unfurnished Novel.” The title refers to her idea that the best fiction does not merely “catalogue” the furniture of life—physical things, processes, and sensations—but selects such details carefully to “present [ ...
「無論是在紙頁上感受到的、沒有具體命名的東西，人們都可能會說，它就是被創造出來的。 這是無法解釋的存在，是未命名之物的存在，是耳朵推測出但未被聽到的泛音，是言語情緒，是事實、事物或行為的情感光環。”

Willa Cather: An IntroductionAccount



NONFICTION

A Swift, Opinionated Portrait of Willa Cather (She Would Have Approved)

“Chasing Bright Medusas,” a new biography by Benjamin Taylor, aims not to uncover new facts but to provide a concise introduction to the novelist.


Willa Cather “believed in luck, particularly her own, and believed in the luck-making power of desire,” Benjamin Taylor writes in his biography of the writer. “She had a destiny, devoutly believed in; she swept aside impediments; her goals were vividly before her.”Credit...Getty Images, via Bettmann Archive
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有偉大的愛，就永遠有奇蹟。Where there is great love, there are always mircles.


Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)


popular Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years,[80] and which has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.[

《讀者文摘• 珠璣集 》 1996年7月號頁149











Image




Whisking through the decades, Taylor propels us from Cather’s birth in Northern Virginia to her family’s move in 1882, when she was 9, to rural Nebraska. From there, it’s on to the town of Red Cloud and through her first years as a wildly talented college student, “acting and dressing more like a boy than a girl, cropping her hair short, going to class in starched white shirts and suspenders, and affecting a low voice,” at the then new University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

Willa Cather

Cather in 1936
Born Wilella Sibert Cather
December 7, 1873
Gore, Virginia, U.S.
Died April 24, 1947 (aged 73)
New York City, U.S.
Resting place Jaffrey, New Hampshire, U.S.
Occupation Novelist
Period 1905–1947







"Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little."
—from THE SONG OF THE LARK (1915) by Willa Cather
In this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines. Thea Kronborg, a minister’s daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she can’t forget and from the man she can’t afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition are not enough. It is in the solitude of a tiny rock chamber high in the side of an Arizona cliff–“a cleft in the heart of the world”–that Thea comes face to face with her own dreams and desires, stripped clean by the haunting purity of the ruined cliff dwellings and inspired by the whisperings of their ancient dust. Here she finds the courage to seize her future and to use her gifts to catch “the shining, elusive element that is life itself–life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” In prose as shimmering and piercingly true as the light in a desert canyon, Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self. READ more here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-song-of-the-lark-…/







除了Agatha Christie之外，其他作者的"全集"之漢一，都可考慮......












New Life for Old Classics as Their Copyrights Run Out
Works by Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Robert Frost are entering the public domain on Jan. 1. And that’s just the first wave.


BooksDec. 31, 2018