"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," Willa Cather observed in her second novel, O Pioneers!, but the same theme resonates throughout all of her work. Passionately involved with the formative days of the settling of the American Midwest, Cather wrote that story in myriad forms in her dozen novels and three score short stories, but always from the point of view of the individual, not the masses. For Cather, it was the individual heart at work that mattered, whether in love, devoted to family and work, or following the muse of art.

Willa Cather was one of the most influential American writers of the first half of the twentieth century, establishing herself with both novels and short stories as "an American classic," according to Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom in their Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy. In...