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Cather ended her lengthy stay in Red Cloud on 27 October 1921, her departure being
noted in true small town fashion in the Argus that day: "Miss Willa Cather,
Mrs. W. A. Sherwood, and Mrs. Irene Weisz were passengers to Omaha this morning." Her
companions were her childhood friends, the Miner sisters. They stayed at the Fontenelle
Hotel, where Cather was scheduled to speak on Saturday, 29 October. On Friday evening she
was visited by interviewers from the World-Herald, the Daily News, and
the Bee, and three interviews were published the next day, a fourth a little
later. Though short, the interviews contain interesting statements with remarkably little
overlapping.
The World-Herald interviewer deals most with One of Ours, the
novel Cather had just completed, and her early journalistic work in Lincoln and points out
that she had only been in Omaha once before this occasion.
Willa Sibert Cather, Nebraskan, whose pen has given Nebraska prairies a place in literature along with the far west of Bret Harte and the New England of a dozen writers of that region, is in Omaha to speak before an Omaha audience for the first time. Not unusual for one so close to Nebraska's heart to be in the state's metropolis one might say, but this is her second visit to the city in her life.
Miss Cather is to speak before the Omaha Fine Arts society at the Fontenelle at four o'clock today.
Refreshed after a visit to the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. C. F. Cather at Red
Cloud, Nebraska, Miss Cather is returning to New York to prepare her latest novel for the
publishers. Except to state that the title of the new work is One of Ours, and that
it is the story of a Nebraska boy presented in an entirely new way, the woman novelist is
silent regarding it.
"It's a secret, and it's something new," she said at the Fontenelle last
night. And when the writer of My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of
the Lark, not to mention a score or more of other writings equally read, declares
"it's a secret," no one is going to know much about "it." She did say,
however, that she intends working over eight pounds of page-proof of the novel, which will
consume most of the winter.
Miss Cather spoke lightly of her success as a writer. Graduating from the University of
Nebraska when nineteen, she went to Pittsburg, Pa., to the Pittsburg Leader. She
taught in the Allegheny high school, soon joining the staff of McClure's magazine,
where she rose to be managing editor. Holding that position until 1912, she resigned and
entered the independent work which has since brought her to the fore among writers of the
country. Nearly all of her work has been done in the east.
"I really had to work to go through college," she declared. "I was
dramatic critic on the Lincoln State Journal, receiving one dollar a night for my
work. On Sundays I had four columns of trash in the paper. I got four dollars for this. It
was just trash, too, for what could a kid of nineteen write?" Her previous visit to
Omaha was made when she was engaged in this work. She came to see Sarah Bernhardt.
"What are you to speak on before the arts society today?" Miss Cather was asked.
"Oh, on the 'Standardization of Literature and Art,' " she laughed. "I was too lazy to make up a good title for it. That won't be it exactly, but it will be something like that."