Our story for July is “The Enchanted Bluff.” We are making some serious progress on our quest to read all of Willa Cather’s short fiction. So far we’ve read seventeen stories in the four collections pictured above. Our next group… Read More ›
Willa Cather Short Story Project
Response to “Before Breakfast.” The Willa Cather Short Story Project
“Before Breakfast” by Willa Cather is the last story in the posthumously published collection, The Old Beauty and Others (1948). It’s a tight nugget of a story about a successful middle-aged businessman who escapes his work and family for a… Read More ›
June 2020 Reminder for The Willa Cather Short Story Project
Our story this month is “Before Breakfast,” the final of the three stories in The Old Beauty and Others (1948). “Before Breakfast” was the last story Cather finished. She wrote it in the summer of 1944 while staying on Mt. Desert… Read More ›
Response to “The Best Years.” The Willa Cather Short Story Project.
These response posts assume you have read the story under discussion, so there are often spoilers . . . such is the case with this post. Leslie dies! I did not see that coming. Did you? Perhaps I didn’t see… Read More ›
May 2020 Reminder for The Willa Cather Short Story Project
It’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means it’s time for another Willa Cather Short Story Project reminder post! Our story this month is “The Best Years.” This is the second of three stories that make up Cather’s posthumously… Read More ›
“The Old Beauty” Response. The Willa Cather Short Story Project
I read this story over the weekend at our old house, which is for sale. We have a buyer and a closing scheduled for May, knock on wood. I check on the house regularly and now that its getting warmer,… Read More ›
April 2020 Reminder for the Willa Cather Short Story Project
Willa Cather died on April 24, 1947. Our story this month is “The Old Beauty” from The Old Beauty and Others, which was published posthumously on September 13, 1948. “The Old Beauty” is the first of three short stories in… Read More ›
Response to “Two Friends.” The Willa Cather Short Story Project
Just having read “Old Mrs. Harris,” I couldn’t help think that the narrator of this story is Vickie Templeton from that story. When she describes the freedom of summer — “nights of full liberty and perfect idleness…there was no school,… Read More ›
March 2020 Reminder. The Willa Cather Short Story Project
Our story for March is “Two Friends,” the final story in Cather’s 1932 collection, Obscure Destinies. When Willa Cather sent “Two Friends” to her publisher, Alfred Knopf, she wrote that she thought it the best short story she’d ever written…. Read More ›
Response to “Old Mrs. Harris.” The Willa Cather Short Story Project
What an amazing short story! For those of you who haven’t yet read “Old Mrs. Harris,” it’s primarily about three generations of women in the Templeton family — the grandmother, Mrs. Harris; her daughter, Victoria; and her granddaughter, Vickie —… Read More ›