It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer. Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions. I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters. Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs. Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77. I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not. Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi
This sounds great:
ReplyDeleteWhat you can't predict is what will show up in the Story of the Week, which has featured F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Paul Bowles, Sarah Orne Jewett and Thornton Wilder. Sometimes the stories are actually essays, by the likes of Howard Zinn and Raymond Chandler. Sign up here http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/ to receive the Library of America's Story of the Week for free; it arrives in your e-mail box every Monday.
It does. LOA seems to have moved beyond the stuffy confines of academia.
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