The Troll Garden Bison

This collection of Willa Cather stories—her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career—is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and statuse of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes—all are amply represented here in the midst of their boibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtley by a writer gathering her formidable powers. With the psychological presicion of her early master Henry James and the practical wisdom and wit of her contemporary Edith Lewis, Cather shows us innocents seduced, sophisticates undone, marriages sundered, idealism compromised, and the rare soul uplifted by art.