Word: willa
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SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL-Willa Cather-Knoft...
This week appeared Willa Cather's first novel in five years. It is an immaculately written account of a few months in the life of a family in Virginia. The year is 1856. The family is that of sober, plebeian Henry Colbert and his subtle, suffering, tony wife, Sapphira. They live, well-supplied with slaves, a little beyond the edge of civilization, within the fringes of the mountains. Sapphira's widowed daughter, an abolitionist at heart, does good among the mountaineers and the slaves. Sapphira's husband, another, spends most of his time at the mill, earnestly...
...Willa Cather could not possibly write a bad novel; but Sapphira and the Slave Girl bears witness that she can write a dull one. This dullness, though, is the sum of many honest virtues: a nicely formed story, characters drawn with delicate authority, sharp, evocative vignettes of Virginia living & landscape. The whole work has the well-made, healthful, sober clarity of a Dutch interior. And like many unexceptionable people who inspire neither more nor less than respect, Sapphira is not too dull to be pleasant reading...
...small Midwest town of the buggy days has long awaited a novelist who could see it steadily and whole. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, for all its savor, its dusty truth, was only a bucketful of that subject. Authentic handfuls may be found in Booth Tarkington, Willa Gather, Edgar Lee Masters. Kings Row, an intelligent attempt to cover the whole ground, is worthy of respect and worth reading, but it is not the hoped-for article...
...business as a rooming house was the late Mme Katherine Branchard's "house of genius" in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Comfortable under its roof had been scores of stray cats, many a famed writer, including Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, O. Henry, Willa Gather, John Reed, Frank Morris, Stephen Crane...