In novels such as
O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and
My Antonia, Cather evokes the prairie of Nebraska where she grew up, and describes the lives of the immigrant settlers of that region in the late nineteenth century, lives which she portrayed nobly yet realistically. "In a sense," James Woodress wrote in
Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Cather's work is a metaphor for the American westering experience." Later novels such as
The Professor's House and
A Lost Lady reverberate with a pessimism born of Cather's reaction to the materialistic culture of the 1920s, while her last novels, including
Death Comes for the Archbishop and
Shadows on the Rock, delve into history and explore other regions, the American Southwest and Canada's Quebec.
Though Cather's fame rests primarily on her dozen novels, she was also a master of the short story, writing fifty-eight of them between 1892 and her death in 1945. Her last piece of fiction before she died was a short story, and taken in bulk, the stories account for about a third of her total writing. Though her short story output slowed to a trickle after publication of her first novel in 1912, some of her finest stories appeared in her later period, with "Old Mrs.
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