The Brattleboro Literary Festival continues its 2024 season with award-winning author Benjamin Taylor with Ashley Olson. They will be in conversation about the life of Willa Cather.
The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality.
Unlike Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, her idealism was unironic, and she stood alone among the great modern authors—at odds with the fashionable attitudes of her time. Combining intricate analysis with an empathetic, lyrical voice, Benjamin Taylor uncovers the reality of Cather's artistic development, from modest beginnings to the triumphs of her mature years. His book is simultaneously an homage to her character, a warm consideration of her work, and a case being made to read Cather with renewed vigor.
Benjamin Taylor received a 2021 Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice.
Author of two novels, he also edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Ashley Olson has been a member of the National Willa Cather Center's staff since 2008 and has served as the organization's Executive Director since 2014. Olson administers the museum, arts center, ten historic sites, and a 612-acre native prairie that make up the largest collection of nationally designated historic sites dedicated to an American author.
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