The World and the Parish Vol 1

Selected and edited with a commentary by William M. Curtin

The World and the Parish aims to bring together a representative selection of Willa Cather's articles and reviews dating from her first decade as a professional journalist and author, the decade which ended with the appearance of her first published book, April Twilights. As is now well known, Willa Cather was an extraordinarily prolific writer during the early phases of her career. In addition to the poetry and fiction collected and listed in the other volumes of this series, my bibliography lists some five hundred and twenty pieces (excluding brief notices of books), more than half of which are included here in whole or part. In organizing and annotating this formidable mass of material, I have had three main objectives: (1) to enable the reader to trace Willa Cather's development as a writer; (2) to group the material so that the reader interested in a particular subject-the theatre, or music, or literature, for example-can readily locate pertinent selections; and (3) to provide a context sufficient to relate these pieces to Willa Cather's life and to the times, and to suggest some of their connections with the body of her work.

The text is arranged in three parts, corresponding to major developments in Willa Cather's career. Part I, "The Provinces," covers the years in Lincoln and Red Cloud from the fall of 1893, when Cather began to contribute regularly to the Nebraska State Journal, to June of 1896, when she left Nebraska for the East to become managing editor of the Home Monthly. Part II, "The City," is devoted to the period in Pittsburgh when she was working for the Home Monthly and the Leader and sending her famous "Passing Show" column back to Lincoln, first to the Journal, then to the Courier. And, finally, in part III, "The World," come selections which appeared from the spring of 1900 to the spring of 1903, the years Cather free lanced in Pittsburgh's Central High School, and made her first trip abroad.