Who was the best American novelist?

They made you read her in high school. You should still be reading her now.

Some wit said the purpose of high school lit classes is to convince students to dislike literature. As an aspect of this, it’s assumed the kind of work assigned in high school – Animal Farm, Scarlet Letter, Raisin in the Sun, My Ántonia – must be either lowbrow or pretentious or somehow both at once.

But just because 17-year-olds are conversant with a writer doesn’t mean that writer can’t be great: after all, this would disqualify Shakespeare, Toni Morrison and many others.

An old Burlington rail car in a prairie museum. Library of Congress photo.

There is an argument Willa Cather is comfortably among the best novelists, that the great American novel need no longer be sought because Ántonia is already that book. Yet Cather has been undervalued in the postwar period. Her work is more read in high schools than colleges, while Cather’s personal life – irrelevant to her art – gets attention denied her novels owing to the sexual politics that mesmerize the lit world.

I’d like to make a simple case for Cather as the leading American novelist, however meritorious others may be. (My runner-up is Steinbeck, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The simple case is that fours books – Death Comes for the Archbishop, Song of the Lark, One of Ours and My Ántonia -- are equal in quality and significance to the four best books of any U.S. fiction writer. Grad students or close followers of literature may take on the task of producing a better grouping of four novels by an American author, and may succeed, but only by invoking taste. Cather is as good as any novelist the United States has produced, and this statement is likely to remain true.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, loosely based on the lives of two actual young French priests who came to New Mexico in the mid 19^th century, is haunting at many levels.

One is depiction of the magical feeling of mesas, forests and mountains in this very large expanse – New Mexico is more than twice the land area of New York State. Another is memorable depiction of an immoral priest being killed by the indigenous people he was sent to convert, and instead abused. A third is sympathetic presentation of political and cultural concerns of the Navajo and Hopi. Taking into account the indigenous point of view is common in today’s writing, was rare when Cather did in 1927. Finally, Death Comes for the Archbishop does not make Christian evangelists stick-figure villains, instead, showed how a heartfelt desire to serve can be corrupted by religious officialdom.

One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, was Cather’s top volume in the eyes of the world, and panned by the highfalutin for an inexcusable offense – the book is openly patriotic. One of Ours tells the story of a prairie man locked in an loveless marriage who enlists to serve in the Great War hoping to recover his sense of purpose, dying heroically in France. On the final page the man’s sobbing mother is comforted by her maid, who assures mother she will be reunited with son in heaven.

Mencken, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and other literary titans hated the book and also hated that it resonated with readers.

One factor was the high-lit world, long controlled by men, was giving way to serious female novelists – Cather, Edith Wharton, “George” Sand. Today women have a majority presence in literature: serious novelists, their agents and their publishing-house editors are more likely to be female than male. At the time, men were trying to block the female incursion.

Mencken, feeling venomous. Library of Congress.

Lewis said he liked the prairie-centered first half of One of Ours, the subtext being that Cather should stay in her lane – prairie family life was the topic of her first successful book, O Pioneers! The Nebraska pages in which one of Cather’s protagonists struggles to put chains on the tires because a downpour has turned dirt roads to mud is a slice of a forgotten reality.

Hemingway called the battle scenes in the second half of One of Ours contrived, saying that as a woman, Cather couldn’t understand war. This from a man who at the time had only a week-long experience with combat, as an ambulance driver in Italy.

Mencken sneered more than usual, irate that such a popular book was not anti-war. Cather’s respect for her characters and for real persons who died fighting the Deutsch menace – and who 20 years later would be vindicated in their judgment regarding Germany – undercut the prevailing intellectual narrative of 1922 that the Great War was entirely meaningless.

Cather did not shy from the negatives of combat; a chapter of One of Ours depicts how elements of the U.S. military establishment stole from average soldiers and sent them to deaths that could have been avoided. But overall One of Ours lauds men who sacrifice to protect future generations from human evil. To much of the intellectual world, this was a forbidden thought.

While often praising the male of the species, Cather was withering in scorn for women who put on airs or don’t acknowledge society’s debt to male duty. Scorning the putting on of airs is standard across literature. When Cather added praise for being masculine, she introduced a concept customary in her era, but today another forbidden thought.

On the flip side, Cather portrayed self-reliant women of business at a time such behavior was resisted by social conventions. Cather herself was like this. Unhappy with how her initial novels were published, she pressed for better terms and better printing, eventually playing a role in the establishment of publishing giant Knopf.  Women who are the majoritarian influence in contemporary literature don’t necessarily acknowledge Cather’s role as a business leader for women.

Song of the Lark, which opens in a rural Colorado mining town of the1890s, takes the familiar premise of the young man who realizes he can become an artist and applies the tale to a young girl. There’s a subplot about the mine economy of late 19^th century Colorado and its dependence on trafficked Mexican labor.

Protagonist Thea Kronborg’s rise to an opera star in New York City and Dresden – at the time Germany was a center of European high culture – is not triumphalist. Thea succeeds at the cost of breaking her mother’s heart, and does not hesitate in this choice. Thea coldly refuses the modest but admirable local man who proposes, and soon dies at his post in a railway accident. (In Rockies railroading of a century ago, runaway trains were all too regular.) Late in life Thea daydreams of her spurned lover and constructs a sort of shrine to him.

She also daydreams of Moonstone, Colorado, the tiny town where Thea was born, nearly died of pneumonia, was saved by a kindly house-call doctor who first realized her artistic gifts. Having lived in and loved Colorado, I sometimes daydream of Moonstone too – though it doesn’t exist. Many Coloradoans love Moonstone, which has made appearances in other fiction.

Song of the Lark has a Tolstoy-class vast roster of characters. Yet the man Thea ultimately marries – who must dwell with the memorial to her long-dead suitor – is mentioned only in passing. Moonstone was her one true love, and like true loves, always unattainable.

Now when academic critics consider Cather the focus is on her sexuality, part of the larger fixation on viewing sexuality, which is mostly biological and mostly beyond our control, as more important than free-will choices about art, character, faith and devotion.

Probably Cather was gay, though, reclusive, she neither confirmed nor denied her feelings in this. We should respect that she knew better than we what aspects of her life should be public.

Some her protagonists are men with backgrounds quite similar to Cather’s, the author seeming to project herself into male form. Good authors project themselves into others. One need not belong to Identity Group X to write the story of a character who does. If one belongs to Identity Group X, one’s characters need not take that guise.

Cather had close friendships with several women, lived the final third of her life with Edith Lewis, an accomplished editor. When Lewis passed about two decades after Cather, she was buried next to the writer’s grave.

So were they lovers? Contemporary theory goes straight to questions like this, which seem to me – and ought to seem to readers – nobody’s beeswax, as was said on Cather’s prairie.

Whether Cather’s books are good is a vital question, and as regards her books, she made all the decisions. Most likely her sexual longing was, as it is for most, beyond her control. She didn’t make these decisions, God or evolution did. In any case she chose not to write about it. If she had, would that matter compared to her books?

Which brings us to her best, My Ántonia.

Willa Cather. Library of Congress.

Born 1873, Cather grew up in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. At age 10 her family moved to a remote railroad town in Nebraska, for opportunity and to escape the tuberculosis rampaging parts of the East Coast.

My Ántonia begins with the protagonist, Jim Burden – a symbolic name in the mold of Willy Loman – being sent to a remote Nebraska railroad town to live with grandparents because his mother and father died from TB. Jim takes the journey at the same age in the same year to the same place as Cather did, except that Jim has no parents to accompany him on a train that is thundering deep into a dark, scary place.

The book is a story-within-a-story, a form that got attention with Lord Jim a short time before Cather sat down to write this volume. The aging Jim gives a friend a manuscript titled Ántonia, then takes the manuscript back for a moment and changes the title to, My Ántonia.

In the literary present day, aboard the train young Jim encounters a family of impoverished Bohemian immigrants, Bohemian then meaning “from a region of Czechoslovakia” rather than “hipster.” He will get to know the family, especially Ántonia, a girl his age with a bright expression, endless capacity for work and strong desire to learn to read.

Jim and Ántonia pass many hours as childhood playmates; he proves himself to Ántonia by killing a rattlesnake that stalks her. Jim loves Ántonia early on and always, learning only late in life, after both married others and are greying, that she also loved him. The book’s epigraph comes from Virgil and means, “The best days flee first.”

Early sections concern harsh existence on the cold, windswept prairie of the late 19^th century. “The horses and pigs always have breakfast before the people,” says a farm wife. Hostility to immigrants is surprisingly current -- “people who don’t like this country ought to go back home” one nativist tells the Bohemians.

Ántonia and her poor friend Lena become “hired girls” who work in the houses of landed families. Hired girls are looked down on as simpletons and slutty.

When the annual summer Saturday-night dance tent goes up, Lena and Ántonia dance with great enthusiasm while good girls from the good families gaze on stiffly. Ántonia is clear that summer Saturday night when she is young and unattached will be her one chance in life just to have fun.

When Ántonia hires out to the Cutter family, run by a man who owns the railroad-workers bordello in Omaha – it’s amusing to think of Omaha as a den of sin – everyone thinks Ántonia has become a whore. Only Jim and Lena still believe in her, partly because they know Ántonia spends every spare moment reading.

Jim goes off to college at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, same place Cather attended, starting the same year. At college Jim is stunned to behold Lena arriving. She learned dressmaking and parlayed it into a small business, able to put herself through school. Lena becomes well-to-do, representing the woman who uses a business career to free herself from reliance on men, an idea ahead of its time.

Next Jim attends Harvard Law. A full century ago Willa Cather, prairie girl from a state university, understood that America was moving toward Ivy League credentialism. Jim becomes a railway lawyer – the era’s path-to-wealth equivalent of Hillary Clinton becoming a bank lawyer – and lives well. He marries for status, not love, soon is miserable in his own home. Sometimes he passes through Nebraska on the way between coasts for railroad business but does not stop to visit Ántonia, fearing to see her “aged and broken” rather than beautiful and glistening with promise.

In addition to telling detailed stories of Jim, Ántonia, Lena and the generally good-hearted people of pastoral Nebraska, My Ántonia gives the reader two disturbing accounts of how life fails.

One involves two Russian men who arrived in the railway town about the same time as the book’s central characters. Amazed to learn that in Nebraska poor people tend cattle, the Russians exclaim, “In Russia only the rich have cows.” When the town gives Ántonia’s family a cow so they can survive the harsh winter, her father weeps.

Clearly the Russians are running from something. We learn that back in the Motherland, on a subzero February night they were driving sledges to bring guests home to a village from a drunken wedding party when a wolf pack attacked. They pushed the bride and groom off the sledge so the wolves would stop to eat them. They’ve come to the opposite side of the globe to hide from shame.

The other account involves Wick Cutter, the bordello owner, who got his start in this specialized trade with capital from marrying into wealth. Wick and his wife despise each other, spending their years indulging pointless quarrels. In the end Cutter murders his wife; inherits her property; signs a will leaving everything to a relative his wife loathed; then kills himself. This, a potential outcome of the human condition.  

In the conclusion Jim returns to the Nebraska town and sees Ántonia. At first she does not recognize him – she is aged physically but he is broken spiritually, which takes a larger toll. When Ántonia realizes who it is, she is delighted.

Jim learns Ántonia married a simple but honest man who is a good father to their many strong children. Ántonia is “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races,” which then rang biblical. Ántonia is nothing compared to Jim the Harvard lawyer or Lena the urbane businesswoman who attends the theater, but compared to the circumstances of her birth, Ántonia is a success, fully realized.

You’ve guessed that Ántonia tells Jim she loved him and wished their life has gone differently. They accept that the sweetness of youth is gone and they must part. Jim walks along the rutted roadbed, no longer in use, where their wagons came from the train station on the night the two nervous children arrived. He knows that road will never mean to others what it means to him and his Ántonia, and accepts that he should not protest this fate.

The last line -- “whatever we had missed we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” – I’ll put up against “and so we beat on” or any other last line you’d care to name.

In comparison to Fitzgerald’s best-known work, My Ántonia is a hopeful book. Gatsby finds James Gatz murdered, the repulsive Tom and Daisy never pay any price, Nick loses his faith in humanity. In Ántonia a kind of justice is meted out, Ántonia’s efforts are rewarded, Jim achieves self-knowledge. These aren’t cynical enough to suit modern standards, perhaps a reason for the contemporary world’s mildness toward Cather.

There’s also a message about the human enterprise which, to my mind, puts My Ántonia over the bar to greatness (considering the romance aspect of the story is predictable).

Through the book Jim struggles with his feeling that his turn on Earth is a disappointment because he lost Ántonia, that life itself is a disappointment because an ineffable past is gone and cannot be recovered. At the last he realizes his life has been worthwhile and society is engaged in some larger project that is mainly to the good. That conclusion was right 100 years ago – and it’s right today.

Bonus: Collect Your Greatness Thoughts. Sometime this summer All Predictions Wrong will kick off a challenge to readers – name your Great American Novel and state your reasons.

I hope to set up a platform for the results, that will take a bit. So start marshalling your arguments now.

Only paid subscribers will participate in this challenge.

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