Menu
Maybe someday
49
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
18/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Benjamin Taylor
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
November 14, 2023
The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the oppositeâshe took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ãntonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goalâliterary immortality.
What The Reviewers Say
I often wished I could find a brief, clear introduction to Cather’s life and work — a book that would intrigue and illuminate, without bogging down in scholarly disagreements. Benjamin Taylor...offers just that with Chasing Bright Medusas, his crisp sketch of Cather’s life — a portrait, as she described her vision for one of her own novels, 'like a thin miniature painted on ivory'.
Slender, discerning.
This succinct biography is a terrific introduction to the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize winner. But don’t come looking for radical new insights. Taylor’s thorough, thoughtful study is more of a sincerely informed primer or devoted guide than a vigorous cultural analysis.
[Taylor] has written a passionate love letter to her in the form of a brief but illuminating biography. Chasing Bright Medusas clocks in at just over 150 pages but it offers a fine introduction to one of the leading novelists of the American frontier.
