Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up

Willa Cather, widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of this century, has also been dismissed in certain circles as a nostalgist, a cranky critic of the modern world. In Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up, Hermione Lee offers an alternative interpretation of a writer whose life and work were marked by fracture and dislocation, carefully suppressed or camouflaged desires, and a greater interest in the craft of writing than in an old-fashioned longing for rural simplicity. By analyzing the language and entering the landscapes of Cather’s fiction, Lee offers a perceptive account of this famously private woman, discovering an unrivaled imagination, a complexity wrongly interpreted as conservatism, and a writer like no one else.