SOURCE: Arnold, Marilyn. “Apprenticeship in Journalism: Beginnings through 1900.” In Willa Cather's Short Fiction, pp. 1–36. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Arnold presents an overview of Cather's early career and stories.

From 1892, when her first story appeared in print, until the end of 1900 Willa Cather published at least twenty-six short stories, and still others may yet be identified. During this period Cather was learning to write. A gifted young woman with immense potential, she learned by trying her hand at almost every kind of fiction imaginable—romance, realism, fantasy, mystery, parable, adventure, juvenilia, the occult—with mixed success. She employed every mode from the ironic to the sentimental; she experimented with drama and dialect; she used “down home” materials and exotic materials. Although many of the stories of this period are obviously apprentice work, at least two of them (both appearing in the spring of 1900), “Eric Hermannson's...