ABSTRACT
Gertrude Stein had a lot in common with Willa Cather, but their literary lives turned out quite differently. Still they did share some views on the art of writing. Although Cather wrote subtle and often conservative fiction where Stein offered highly experimental and explicitly erotic works (Shaw, “Victorian” 23-24), both knew that journalism and literary art were incompatible. Just as Cather came to see the truth in Jewett’s admonition that she would never be a great writer as long as she was working at McClure’s, Stein told Hemingway, “if you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things, you will only see words and that will not do, that is of course if you intend to be a writer” (ABT 213).1 While both Cather and Stein needed and wanted to make money at their profession and to secure an appreciative audience, both wrote for reasons other than fortune and fame. Both writers were “trying to do something quite different,” in the words of Cather’s Godfrey St. Peter, and like St. Peter, both struggled to communicate with a critical readership that “merely thought [they were]…trying to do the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well” (PH 32). Experimental in her own way, Cather sought to create her own kind of realism and explored different possibilities for the novel demeuble.2 For her part, Stein showed a career-long interest in the potential of modern narrative, particularly as it related to the virtually concomitant coming of age of modernity and of her own sense of self.
