The Willa Cather Archive is freely distributed by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Text created for online distribution on the Willa Cather Archive (http://cather.unl.edu).
End-of-line hyphenation silently removed where appropriate.
Typographical or spelling irregularities in the orginal have been noted using markup.
Alexander's Bridge, Cather's first novel, brought about her first authentic
interview in a weekly feature of the New York Sun entitled "Literary News,
Views, and Criticism." Cather clipped the interview, marked it with heavy black
lines, and sent it home to her family (Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Collection). It is one of the
rare instances when she talked at any length about the book. Unsigned, the interview would
seem to indicate that Miss Cather dominated after the opening sentence, to the extent of
repeating the interviewer's questions. Her later interviews clearly show, however, a
different style. "Certainly, " "Not at all," and "Certainly
not," are the far more characteristic, terse responses that she made to questions.
This interview was drawn upon heavily but not identified by Grant M. Overton in his
chapter on Cather in the first edition of The Women Who Make Our Novels (New
York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918).
Willa S. Cather has been kept busy denying that her novel Alexander's Bridge,
which was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Company, has anything to do with whist.
"The only kind of bridge in the story," she says, "is a cantilever bridge.
No, it isn't an industrial novel either. It does not give any more information about
bridge building than it does about whist. In fact it doesn't give information about
anything. Do I believe in the industrial novel that does give information? Certainly, but
that is one kind of a story; this is another.
"This is not the story of a bridge and how it was built, but of a man who built bridges. The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself only in his work everything goes well; but he runs the risk of encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli.
"Is Alexander himself meant to be a portrait of a noted New York architect? Not at all. He was not suggested by any one person. He simply has some of the characteristics which I have noticed in a dozen architects, engineers and inventors.
"Is the actress in the story meant to be much like Hilda Trevelyan? Certainly not. Miss Trevelyan is a different sort of person. I tried, however, to give the actress in this story certain qualities which I have found oftener in English actresses than in our own."