Confession: I'd never read Willa Cather before reviewing this book. Always meant to, just never got around to it. My knowledge was mostly limited to: She wrote about the Midwest a long time ago and became well-known later in life.
Fortunately, Cather expertise isn't a prerequisite for reading "Chasing Bright Medusas" and in fact, this "brief and tender biography" (in the publisher's words) is a nice introduction to her life and work.
Benjamin Taylor's slim homage to Cather can be read in an evening or two, and provides just enough detail about each of her works to help a novice decide where to start.
If, like me, you don't know much about her life, it's a groundbreaking one. Born in Virginia nearly 150 years ago in 1873, raised in rural Nebraska, her brilliance was clear at an early age. First in her class of three at Red Cloud High School, she delivered a valedictorian speech titled "Investigation versus Superstition." Not "the best is yet to come?" As Taylor notes, "For its framing of large concepts, its intellectual concepts, its sheer elan, the address would be extraordinary as a college valedictory." Cather was 16.
Taylor summarizes Cather's career in journalism, from the Nebraska State Journal to McClure's magazine in New York, as her work was beginning to be published. While her first novel, "Alexander's Bridge," was set in Boston and London — cities she didn't know like rural America — in her second, "O Pioneers!," she wrote "to her strong suit: the Nebraska Divide."
She discovered what many writers struggle to learn — write what you know. She later observed about young writers, "The things he knows best he takes for granted, since he is not continually thrilled by new discoveries about them."
"O Pioneers!" was published in 1913 to critical acclaim, and as Taylor notes, "At 40, Willa had arrived."
Taylor — a lifelong fan — intersperses Cather's literary journey with her personal life, including her "great love" Isabelle McClung and longtime companion Edith Lewis. Given the social climate of the time, it's unclear if Cather and Lewis were viewed as anything more than roommates.
