Richard Harris's Response to Janis Stout's Comment

Abstract

In a letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, written toward the end of her life, Cather admitted that for her the writing process had been not a matter of inventing, but rather of recalling, rearranging, and reconstructing experiences, memories, and other types of materials (WC to CMS, 29 April [1945]). Because I am interested in Cather as artist, in the creative process that went into the making of her fiction, most of the work I have done on her has focused on her use of sources and influences. Much of Cather's fiction, I am convinced, is the product of a syndetic imagination that saw interesting relationships between actual experience and an enviable body of knowledge. Cather borrowed and adapted material throughout her career. It was Cather's combination, recasting, and recreation of these source materials that so often gives her fiction its rich texture. Janis Stout's placing Cather's use of A Year in the Navy in the broader context of Cather's career as a whole establishes a point that I too have arrived at over the last number of years. The Ninth International Cather Seminar held at Breadloaf, Vermont, in 2003 had as its theme Willa Cather as Literary Icon. During her lifetime Cather did achieve a kind of iconic status; in her later years she was recognized as la grande dame of American letters. The precocious young woman who wrote sometimes scathing columns of literary, dramatic, and music criticism for the Lincoln papers while a student at the University of Nebraska in the 1890s, who moved to Pittsburgh at the age of twenty-three to begin a career, who was so successful as an editor at McClure's magazine, did not, however,