It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer. Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions. I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters. Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs. Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77. I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not. Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi
Speaking of Easter, that photo reminds me of Hawthorne's "Maypole of Merrymount". And speaking of the old Yankee milieu, I just got from the library the following book:
ReplyDelete"Lives Like Loaded Guns - Emily Dickinson & Her Family Feuds"
by Lyndall Gordon
According to the author, Miss Emily's seclusion was caused by her lifelong illness (epilepsy) though she was a bit more assertive and demonstrative than is commonly thought.
here's a good idea of what that pole looked like:
ReplyDeletehttp://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=414996&t=w
Isn't Gordon the one who wrote the book on Wollstonecraft?
ReplyDelete