![]() ![]() ![]() When I am away from it I remember only the tang on the tongue. Wrote Cather to a friend as she was drafting the book while living in Arizona, “The West always paralyzes me a little. As with Cather’s own family, who moved west from Virginia when she was 8, it tells of transplanted Nebraskans who set themselves to finding a place on the oceanic prairie. O Pioneers, the first of the so-called Prairie Trilogy (its other parts being The Song of the Lark and My Antonia), is a crystalline tale so well-constructed that it’s hard to imagine improving on it. One hundred years ago, she published a book that evidently pleased her-for, as the editors of the scholarly edition note, when the 1913 novel O Pioneers was reprinted in 1937, she changed only 100 words, far more than the single correction that earlier editors had assumed but far less than she made to other of her books. ![]() ![]() And she was ruthless in correcting and sometimes reworking whole books years after they were first published. Notably, she forbade the publication of her correspondence and other private papers. She destroyed drafts that displeased her, threw away whole manuscripts, tossed edited proofs, burned letters. Willa Cather was no friend to archivists. ![]()
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