MATERIAL MEMORY: WILLA CATTIER, "MY FIRST NOVELS (THERE WERE TWO)," AND THE COLOPHON: A BOOK COLLECTOR'S QUARTERLY

Willa Cather's 1931 essay "My First Novels (there were two)"1 occupies an important-but often overlooked-position in Cather scholarship. Along with essays like "The Novel Démeublé" and the letter excerpt "On The Professor's House," it is routinely invoked to establish the central details about Cather's authorial aesthetic and her sense of an emerging literary voice. In her preface for the 1922 edition of Alexander's Bridge (1912), Cather writes, "It is difficult to comply with the request that I write a preface for this new edition of an early book. Alexander's Bridge was my first novel, and does not deal with the kind of subject-matter in which I now find myself most at home" (v). In "My First Novels (there were two)," Cather further distances herself from her first novel by making O Pioneers! (1913) an additional "first" novel. It was O Pioneers! in which she first wrote about "a kind of country I loved." Scholars, most often, have relied upon "My First Novels (there were two)" to classify O Pioneers! as an act of literary departure. A critical aspect of the interpretive significance of Cather's essay, however, has to do with the occasion for which she wrote this significant, self-defining narrative, beginning with the fact that Cather wrote the essay specifically for inclusion in The Colophon: A Book Collector's Quarterly. No scholarly work to date has explicated this aspect of Cather's publishing history. © 2013 Project MUSE.