SOURCE: Brown, E. K. “Troll Garden, Goblin Market, 1902-1905.” In Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, pp. 95–124. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1953.

In the following essay, Brown traces Cather's early literary development.

The decade Willa Cather spent in Pittsburgh—from her twenty-third to her thirty-third year—fell evenly into two periods devoted to the two careers; she was a newspaperwoman for five of these years and a teacher for the remaining five. As if to establish, also, a difference between the unsettled, exacting journalism and the settled life of the classroom, the second half of the decade was marked by a change from boarding-house life to residence in a sedate mansion, in Pittsburgh's finest section, where Willa Cather found herself surrounded by the luxuries she had craved when young and a warm friendship that was devoted to providing her with an environment helpful to creative writing.

Willa Cather met...