Well, Cather fans, here we are. I can’t believe we are launching into our last Willa Cather short story (at least for this project). When I started this reading project in February 2019, the end seemed so far away and sometimes impossible, but I’m glad to have stuck with it. Thanks to everyone who has dipped in over the years!

“Double Birthday” was published in the February 1929 issue of Forum (volume 81, issue 2). The story is still under copyright, but you can read it on the Internet Archive. It’s also available in two print collections, The Pittsburgh Stories of Willa Cather, ed. by Peter Oresick (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2016) or Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929, ed. by Bernice Slote (U of Nebraska Press, 1973).

The Forum was a magazine for readers, and it is fun to browse through issues, looking at bylines and book advertisements and reading a bit here and there. The image below is intentionally large so you can read the table of contents. The first paragraph of the Editorial Forword is pretty great, too (Sweet Home Chicago!).

The page after the table of contents announces essays and stories in the next issue, including one I’d like to read: “Women and Fiction” by Virginia Woolf, “A leading woman essayist and novelist explains why women have attained such startling success in recent literature.”

Double Birthday: The Sleeper of this Project

“Double Birthday” almost didn’t make it into this project. It and “Uncle Valentine” were stories I somehow overlooked, even though “Uncle Valentine” is right there in the title of one of the collections on my shelf (Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929). Insert face-palm emoji. I added those two stories to our list in December 2023.

I was even more surprised to learn that John Updike and Katrina Kenison chose “Double Birthday” for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin 1999). Michael Gorra writes in his New York Times review of the collection that “none of the Cather fans I have talked to have ever heard of “Double Birthday.” That made me feel better, as I, too, had never heard of this story. And yet there it is, chosen by a literary luminary to stand forever (or at least in this collection) as one of the best American short stories of the 20th century. That’s saying something.

I only know about the inclusion of “Double Birthday” in that collection because my Book Cougars buddy Emily has been doing her own short story project this year (she’s reading one short story a week on Mondays). She checked out the collection to read a different short story (“In the Gloaming” by Alice Elliott Dark) and looked to see if a Cather story was among the chosen. Thank you, Emily!

Of the 56 stories included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, John Updike writes in the introduction,

“I tried not to select stories because they illustrated a certain theme or portion of the national experience but because they struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important.”

Having never read John Updike and not knowing much about him beyond his name, I have no idea if his opinion is worth anything, but I am looking forward to reading “Double Birthday.”

What’s next

Read “Double Birthday” sometime this month, then come back to discuss it in the response post I’ll share on August 28th. Or, feel free to read it now and comment here if you can’t wait until then!

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New to this blog? Learn more about the Willa Cather Short Story Project here. In a nutshell, we read one Cather short story a month. I remind everyone what story we’re reading on the second Wednesday of the month and then share a response on the fourth Wednesday. Jump in anytime!