CHASING BRIGHT MEDUSAS: A Life of Willa Cather, by Benjamin TaylorDuring the difficult months of 2020, a writer friend and I decided to read Willa Cather’s fiction together. Much of it was rereading, but I’d missed some stories and novels, and I’d never read them sequentially or with a clear sense of Cather’s life. Tonally and politically different, written with obvious adoration or apparent dislike, focusing intently on Cather’s work or scrutinizing her private life — so many biographies! From Edith Lewis’s “personal record” in “Willa Cather Living” (1953) to the massive, almost day-by-day accounting of James Woodress’s “Willa Cather: A Literary Life” (1987) and the detailed critical readings of Hermione Lee’s “Willa Cather: Double Lives” (1989), I learned lots about Cather, and sometimes more than I wanted about her biographers. A fresh perspective on Cather’s sexuality came from Sharon O’Brien’s “Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice” (1986), while Joan Acocella provided a witty, abrasive take on academic analyses of Cather’s work in “Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism” (2000).

---

Persons: Willa Cather, Benjamin Taylor, Willa Cather’s, I’d, Edith Lewis’s “, “ Willa Cather, ”, James Woodress’s “ Willa Cather, Hermione Lee’s “ Willa Cather, Cather, Sharon O’Brien’s “ Willa Cather, Joan Acocella, Proust, Philip Roth, “, Taylor Locations: “