In the following essay excerpt, Gerber offers a brief overview of "The Diamond Mine," focusing on the conflict between an artist's personal and professional lives.
All of the four new stories collected in Youth and the Bright Medusa concern the problems of professional musicians—singers—and as a group they develop the theme of the artist as celebrity, the relationship to society resulting from the pressure of popular fame, and the personal cost to the artist exacted by a life devoted to pleasing one's "public." It was a theme that was gaining currency swiftly in Cather's life, as her books became ever more widely sold and openly praised, making demands on her privacy she had not wholly anticipated. It was also a major strand of the new popular culture that was making headway in American society generally, where.....
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