Merrill Skaggs, Drew University

Cather is currently revealing herself as a writer and reader intensely aware of her contemporaries. The following list, by name of the writer she read, also lists scholars (with their emails) who have agreed to help answer questions about Cather and her contemporaries.

Adams, Henry:
John T. Jacobs ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Jacobs, John T. "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and Death Comes for the Archbishop: The Design of Willa Cather's Cathedral." Literature and Belief 21 (2001): 1-15.

Bergson, Henri:
Tom Quirk ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Quirk, Tom. Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather & Wallace Stevens. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990.

Faulkner, William:
See Skaggs, Merrill. Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007.

Or,

Joseph Urgo ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) Or see Urgo, Joseph. ed., with Ann Abadie. William Faulkner and His Contemporaries. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002.

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield:
Mark Madigan ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see, Madigan, Mark. "Edith Lewis, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and the Scars of 'The Profile.'" Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions. Eds. John J. Murphy and Merrill Maguire Skaggs. Madison, NJ: FDU Press, 2008. 252-59.

Or,

Madigan, Mark. "Willa Cather and the Book-of-the-Month Club." Cather Studies 7. Ed. Guy Reynolds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. 68-85.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott:
Joseph Urgo ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Gale, Zona:
Deborah Lindsay Williams ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Williams, Deborah. Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Edith Wharton, and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Macmillan, 2001.

Or,

Williams, Deborah. "The Cosmopolitan Regionalism of Zona Gale's Friendship Village." Middlebrow Moderns. Eds. Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University P, 2003. 45-65.

Glasgow, Ellen:
See Skaggs, Merrill. "The Interlocking Works of Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow." Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South. Ed. Ann Romines. Charlottesville: U Press of Virginia, 2000. 158-169.

Or,

Skaggs, Merrill. "Ellen Glasgow." The History of Southern Women's Literature. Eds. Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2002. 336-42.

Grey, Zane:
John Swift ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Swift, John. "`What subtle, strange message had come to her out of the West?': Willa Cather and Zane Grey's West." paper presented at WLA, October 2008, Boulder, Colorado.

Hemingway, Ernest:
Steve Shively ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) Shively led discussion on this topic, Spring Conference, Red Cloud, NE: June, 2008.

Or,

Joseph Urgo ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Howells, William Dean:
John J. Murphy ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Murphy, John J. "William to Willa, Courtesy of Sarah: Cather, Jewett, and Howellsian Principles." American Literary Realism 38.2 (2006): 145-59.

James, Henry:
Elsa Nettels ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Nettels, Elsa. Language and Gender in American Fiction. Charlottesville: U Press of Virginia, 1997.

Or,

Nettels, Elsa. "Tradition and the Woman Artist: James's The Tragic Muse and Cather's The Song of the Lark." Willa Cather Newsletter and Review 36.3 (Fall 1992): 27-31.

James, William:
Tom Quirk ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

Or,

Patrick Dooley ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Dooley, Patrick. "Philosophical Pragmatism and Theological Temperament: The Religious and the Miraculous in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop." Willa Cather and the Culture of Belief. Ed. John J. Murphy. Provo: BYU Press, 2002. 123-137.

Or,

Dooley, Patrick. "Is Proselytizing Indigenous People an Act of Violence? Willa Cather's Missionaries in Shadows on the Rock and Death Comes for the Archbishop." Cithera 46.2 (May 2007): 25-34.

Or,

Dooley, Patrick. "Willa Cather's Phenomenology of Memory and William James's 'Specious Present'." Philosophy Today 50.5(Winter 2006): 444-49.

Larsen, Nella:
Jessica G. Rabin ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Rabin, Jessica. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge, 2004. Second printing, 2005.

Lawrence, D. H.:
John Swift ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or see Swift, John. Self and Other in D. H. Lawrence, Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Virginia, 1978.

---."Repetition, Consummation, and `The Eternal Unrelief'." The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.

Munro, Alice:
Robert Thacker ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Thacker, Robert. "Alice Munro's Willa Cather." Canadian Literature 134 (Winter 1992): 42-57.

Nevin, Ethelbert:
Ann Moseley ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), or see Ann Moseley's forthcoming Scholarly Edition for The Song of the Lark from University of Nebraska Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich:
Ann Moseley ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

Or,

Marilyn Callander ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Porter, Katherine Anne:
See Skaggs, Merrill. "Willa Cather's Influence on Katherine Anne Porter's 'He'." Southern Quarterly (Winter, 1996): 23-26.

Or,

Skaggs, Merrill. "The Louisianas of Katherine Anne Porter's Mind." Louisiana Women Writers. Eds. Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992. 155-68.

Stein, Gertrude:
Jessica G. Rabin ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or see Rabin, Jessica G. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge, 2004. Second printing 2005.

Twain, Mark:
Tom Quirk ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or see "Twain and Cather, Once Again." Willa Cather and the American Southwest. Eds. John N. Swift & Joseph R. Urgo. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. 89-93.

Undset, Sigrid:
Sherrill Harbison ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or see Harbison, Sherrill. "Sigrid Undset and Willa Cather: A Friendship." Willa Cather Newsletter and Review 23 (1998-9): 53-59.

Harbison, Sherill. "Willa Cather and Sigrid Undset: The Correspondence in Oslo." Resources for American Literary Study 26.2 (2000): 236-59.

Welty, Eudora:
Ann Romines ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Welty, Eudora. "The World of Willa Cather." The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Random House, 1977. 41-60.

Or,

Romines, Ann. The Home Plot: Women, Writing and Domestic Ritual. Amherst: U of Mass Press, 1992.

Wharton, Edith:
John J. Murphy ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Murphy, John J. "Filters, Portraits, and History's Mixed Bag: A Lost Lady and The Age of Innocence." Twentieth Century Literature 38.4 (1992): 478-85.

Or,

Murphy, John J. "Compromising Realism to Idealize a War: Wharton's The Marne and Cather's One of Ours." American Literary Realism 33.2 (2001): 157-67.

Woolf, Virginia:
Louise Poresky ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Or see Poresky, Louise. "Cather and Woolf in Dialogue: The Professor's House and To the Lighthouse." Papers on Language and Literature 1 (2008): 67-86.

About the Contributor:

Merrill Maguire Skaggs, from Drew University, published numerous essays as well as five books on Willa Cather: After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather (1990), Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner (2007), as editor--Willa Cather's New York: New Essays on Cather and the City (2000), as co-editor, Violence, the Arts, and Cather (with Joseph R. Urgo, 2007), and Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions (2008, with John J. Murphy). She twice won Distinguished Teaching Awards at Drew University, and taught sold-out neighborhood auditor classes at the Madison, New Jersey, public library. She widely lectured on Willa Cather, and was the premier lecturer at the Willa Cather Foundation's first Elderhostel immersion learning course in the summer of 2008.