SOURCE: Woodress, James. “Obscure Destinies.” In Willa Cather: A Literary Life, pp. 170–83, 435–48. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Woodress presents an overview of the stories in The Troll Garden and Obscure Destinies, and addresses the effect these publications had on Cather's career and personal life.

While Cather was basking in the glow of being a published poet, a momentous chain of events was taking place. H. H. McClure, head of the McClure Syndicate, passed through Lincoln scouting for talent, and Will Owen Jones urged him to look at the work of his former columnist. H. H. McClure told his cousin, S. S. McClure, the magazine editor and publisher, and that volatile genius wrote Cather inviting her to submit her stories for possible magazine and book publication. She mailed them to him in April but without much confidence that anything significant would happen. She already had...