Word: willa
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...rigorously simple and familiar saga, The Emigrants is made eloquent through the tone and the telling. Director Jan Troell gives life and substance to what Willa Cather called "the precious, the incommunicable past." Indeed, at its best, The Emigrants has the same feeling for landscape and incident (a man proud of a pair of new black boots, a death and burial at sea) that glistens in Cather's best work...
...husbands' credentials alone: all the other women distinguished themselves by their ideas and actions--in the arts, in the sciences, in religion and reform, in business and philanthropy. The biographers are noted scholars themselves--Anne Firor Scott on Jane Addams, Allan Nevins on Jessie Benton Fremont, Leon Edel on Willa Cather and Alice James...
Wallace Stegner shares with Willa Gather what Edmund Wilson once called "two currents of profound feeling-one for the beauty of those lives lived out between the sky and the prairie; the other for the pathos of the human spirit making the effort to send down its roots and to flower in that barren soil." In this book, Stegner rides both currents...
Katherine Anne Porter is praising the short stories of Willa Gather, but the lines could be used without revision to describe some of her own small classics. Noon Wine (1937), a short novel, recounts a stark frontier tragedy of murder and remorse as muted and inevitable as anything by Thomas Hardy. Another flawless short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), describes the descent of a consciousness toward death-and its reluctant return to life -with mesmeric power...
...caustic, illusionless side of Miss Porter that pervades much of this collection of essays, reviews, asides and letters. Only a few well-made literary essays-on Thomas Hardy, Eudora Welty, Willa Gather-reflect morning freshness and intelligence at high noon...