7 December 2011
Wednesday's Poem: "Boston Ancestors" by Susan Minot, from Poems 4 A.M. Wednesday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of the woman who said: "It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel." That's the novelist Willa Cather, born in the village of Back Creek near Winchester, Virginia (1873). When Cather was nine years old, she and her family left their home in Virginia to homestead in Nebraska, and the Nebraska prairie is the setting of her great novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918). But Cather's productive years as a writer were spent not in Nebraska but in New York City. She moved there in 1906 when she was offered a job as managing editor at McClure's magazine. She lived with Edith Lewis in a studio apartment at 60 Washington Square South, in a red-brick row house, on a block called "Genius Row" because over the years its tenants included Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, O. Henry, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. Despite living in the midst of it, Cather seems to have stayed at the periphery of the Bohemian community of Greenwich Village...
Dec. 07, 2011: The Writer's Almanac • Opuss № I