My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Penguin Group Viking for an advanced copy of this biography of a gifted woman who worked hard at everything she ever accomplished from writing, teaching, learning and who she could love.

Publishers love young writers. Youth attracts youth, and the hope of years and years of solid backlist sales, along with maybe summer reading titles makes them giddy with excitement. 30 Under 30, 20 under 20, even O under zygote lists. To publishers older writers are hard to market. Not that publishing understands youth or how to market in many ways. A new writer over 30 is treated like a person in Logan's Run who has gotten to a certain age, nice knowing you, there is the door. There is a saying in the music industry, one has their whole life to make their first album, six months to a year for their second. And that is true in writing. One draws on what one knows and has learned. That is why many of this under 30 writers disappear so quickly. One can only write about college and bad dates for so long. For a woman this is even harder. At a certain age, no matter the age being over a hundred years ago, or just last week, woman are expected to be married, with children, and childhood dreams left behind for the reality of woman's work. Which is as stupid as it reads. I'd like to think that Willa Cather would have heard this, said something semi-rude, and than gone back to work writing her books, loving her companion, and living the life she lived and enjoyed so much. Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor is a biography of both the author, and Cather's works looking at the influences, work ethic, and life that she created for herself, even before Cather became a famous writer.

Wilella Sibert Cather was born in Virginia, but grew up in Nebraska in the small town of Red Cloud, a place that will be very familiar to Cather's readers. Cather played with her name for many years before deciding on Willa Sibert Cather, one she used for the rest of her life. Growing up Cather was given many opportunities, ones she grabbed with both hands, for Cather had dreams. A small town grocer taught her classics including Greek and Latin, and a love for works like the Aenid. Cather hoped to go to school to be a doctor, but a teacher submitted some of her works to a local paper, giving Cather a thrill of seeing her name in print. Journalism was her calling, writing anything for local papers, while teaching on the side. Graduating college, Cather took a job offer in Pittsburgh for a time, before moving to New York, a city she spent the rest of her life in, working for McClure's Magazine as editor. During this time Cather published poetry, essays and short stories, but it wasn't until the age of forty that Cather published her novels, book that would make summer reading lists and secure her literary place in history.

A biography that is as much about the writing as the writer, and though a small book is very informative and inspiring in many ways. There is a lot about the influences that Cather drew on, her town the people she knew, the places she lived, even the stories she read as an editor, both good and bad. I have read Cather, O Pioneers! and My Ántonia but knew very little about her nor the extraordinary life she lived, and even more the way she lived her life. Taylor discusses most of the this, and while the book does jump around a bit, is a very complete and compelling study of Cather's life. The writing is very good, and well researched with a lot of information and history that I knew little about. The influences are especially interesting, as one would think that Nebraska would not be the best place to gain an education, but a lot of that is probably because Cather took every opportunity she could.

A very good writer about a writer that many might not know much about or confuse with Edith Wharton or other writers. And that would be unfair. Around the holidays dealing with retail is draining, so I tend to read books that are familiar or that I read in the past and sort of remember. This year I will be adding some Cather to the list. A really wonderful biography that serves as a great introduction to an fascinating life. Perfect for readers of Cather, for people who need a boost in their life, or writers who have whole novels over 40 and are afraid of what might happen.

Book Reviews: Summer 2023
Pennsylvania Literary Journal
By: Anna Faktorovich
https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2023/

A Digressive Biography of a Professional Female Author: Willa Cather
Benjamin Taylor, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather (New York: Penguin Group: Viking, November 14, 2023). 123pp. ISBN: 978-0-593298-82-4.
***
“The story of Willa Cather” (1873-1947) “is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality. Unlike Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, her idealism was unironic, and she stood alone among the great modern authors—at odds with the fashionable attitudes of her time… Taylor uncovers the reality of Cather’s artistic development, from modest beginnings to the triumphs of her mature years.”
This is a very frustrating biography to read. The introductory comments flitter between puffing her different books, celebrating her western origins, and quoting her non-fiction communications. Then, the “One: To a Desert Place” chapter begins with a digression on a definition of a Native American term, before it moves to her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), which is noted as having been criticized by Toni Morrison for its perception of blackness through the “white gaze”. Most of the text focuses on summarizing the events depicted in this novel, and offers other critical remarks on it. Then, the narrative moves on to post-Civil War politics in the West. And then the story gradually shifts to making broad guesses about what Cather’s early life might have been like, based on their being a melting pot of different nationalities like “Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians” in these places. Such generalities really do not add anything to a reader’s understanding of an author. One of the first specifics offered is this: “Farm life in rural Webster County did not suit Charles Cather, and after eighteen months he moved his family from the Divide to Red Cloud proper.” In the latter place he started a lending, real estate and the like business, and moved away from farming. The preceding pages of this book were setting up Cather as a symbolic farmer’s daughter, who was passionate about the countryside, and now we learn that she was the daughter of a wealthy businessman, who was mostly detached from any of these rural ideals.
Chapter “Five: Breaking Free” opens with a description of where she lived in New York at this stage in her career in 1912, with her negative comments about this place to Elizabeth Sergeant. Then, there is a curious note: “She was busy throughout the summer of 1913 – the summer of her triumph with O Pioneers! – doing a large favor. She had consented to write Sam McClure’s autobiography, basing herself solely on his spoken recollections”. It was serialized in McClure and published as a book and merely included this note “from the supposed author: ‘I wish to express my indebtedness to Miss Willa Sibert Cather for her invaluable assistance in the preparation of these memoirs.’ She’d written every word of them.” Taylor appears to be acknowledging that there were no “spoken recollections” to work from, but rather that she simply ghostwrote the whole work, probably in exchange for having her first success, O Pioneers! puffed by McClure’s friends, thus generating the critical and fiscal “success” out of an exchange of ghostwriting for puffery.
While most of this book is tedious to read as it flitters on various unrelated subjects, there are clearly valuable nuggets of information scattered across it. Thus, scholars of Cather and those who merely enjoy reading her should find some curious or relevant to their own information if they read this book closely enough. There is a search option in the ebook I reviewed, so searching for specific names, places or titles of interest should be easy. This seems to be the only mention of Cather writing an “autobiography” for somebody else, and there are no usages of terms like “ghostwriter” across the book.