ABSTRACT
The Willa Cather I propose to write about is not Nebraska’s daughter who became America’s foremost celebrant of the pioneer period, but a devoted city-dweller who left behind an exceptionally thorough exploration of the urban settings in which she chose to live.1 Despite our close identification of Cather with the rural town of Red Cloud, the fact is that as soon as she was old enough to leave her parents’ home, Cather lived in ever larger cities: Lincoln, Nebraska (where she attended the University), Pittsburgh (where she worked as a teacher and journalist), and New York (where she resided throughout most of her adult life). For Cather, as for many other women, becoming a writer was inextricably tied to leaving the country for the city: it involved confronting and challenging the domestic, female and personal culture so closely identified with nature, to take her place in a public and male culture identified with urban settings (see Squier 1984:4-5). Not surprisinglyfor she was a writer who drew extensively upon her life for her art-Cather made the idea of the city one of the most important and complex subjects of her fiction.
