In a sense Cather's work is a metaphor for the American westering experience.
Her work is not confined to Nebraska, however, and a second large area of her interest is the Southwest, which she discovered and fell in love with when she was thirty-eight and used as the setting for Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), the novel she thought her best, and significant parts of two other novels. Her interest in the Southwest, which includes the people and their culture as well as the land, turned her attention to the history of that region and to history in general. As a result, three of her last four novels are historical reconstructions of the Southwest, Quebec, and Virginia (her natal state), and she was at work on a fourth historical novel to be laid in medieval France when she died in 1947.
Whether she is writing of Nebraska in her youth or seventeenth-century Quebec, her work is always meticulously crafted. She wrote slowly, averaging no more than one novel every three years, and regarded the writer's art as an activity that required complete dedication. Her fiction is written in language that is disarmingly clear and simple but at the same time richly allusive and subtle.
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