Money v Prestige, Bestseller v Canon

Willa Cather's publication history, part I

Willa Cather was famous in her lifetime. She was recognized on the street; reporters tracked down her otherwise private address and shouted questions through locked doors. When her last novel was published in 1941, it sold 16,000 copies in the first few weeks, and Book of the Month Club ordered a separate printing of 200,000. Houghton Mifflin had already issued a deluxe twelve volume deluxe edition of her collected works.

Today, Cather remains a well-known, canonized writer whose novels are often assigned in both high schools and colleges (a rare feat), analyzed by scholars, and quoted in booktok videos.

To some extents, Cather ran the table of #writergoals: she sold a lot of copies, made a lot of money on her books, was esteemed and lauded during her day, and remains so long after her death. But there is a significant rift hidden in this precis.

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The works for which she is known today were not the ones that made her significant money during her lifetime, and the ones which did throw off huge royalties are no longer known or much read, nor were they critically acclaimed when initially published. There are broadly two Cathers: the one who wrote O Pioneers! And My Antonia, for which she is known, read, and written about today but did not make her famous or rich, and the Cather of One of Ours and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which are largely forgotten, but providede her with money, awards, and notoreity.

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Cather’s first book was basically self-published.¹ A collection of poems, she paid to have it published by what used to be called a vanity press. Cather was then and working as a teacher in Pittsburgh, where had moved from Lincoln, Nebraska to work as a journalist for local newspapers and magazines. She wrote fiction and poetry in her off hours. But she found the daily output required by newspapers enervating, so she switched to teaching as a day job.  She liked teaching, and it afforded her more time, particularly in the summers, to write.

Some of her poems she published in the magazine she worked for, Home Monthly, and others she sold to national magazines like Harpers Weekly and Lippincott’s (note that these were both magazines run by presses, which was for quite a long time in American history how many magazines were funded; not true today).

Richard Badger, a Boston publisher, saw her poems and reached out. His press asked authors to “share in the expense of publication.” Despite our current prejudices against the quality of such vanity presses, this was a not unusual way for many of the writers we now deem canonical, who did not come from elite or prestigious backgrounds, to get their feet in the door (Jane Austen did the same). Nor were such books disdained by critics: the New York Times reviewed April Twilights, along with several other national outlets. Cather took pride in this book, selling it to friends, and releasing a revised edition decades later. Today, you can buy a signed first printing of the first edition (of which there were precious few) of April Twilights for $8500.

During this period Cather also sent short stories to S. S. McClure, the mercurial publisher of McClure’s Magazine, then the most pathbreaking magazine, where Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell were publishing their muckraking journalism (about whom the terms in coined). McClure’s, to continue the magazine-and-book collab theme above, also published books. McClure loved Cather’s stories and offered to publish them both in the magazine and as a standalone volume.

This is the bit of Cather’s bio that is often repeated and thus well-known, that McClure discovered her, offered her a book contract and a job. The book, The Troll Garden, was published two years after April Twilights, in 1905.  This time, the critics weren’t enthusiastic: “a collection of freak stories that are either lurid, hysterical, or wholeseome and that remind one of nothing so much as the colored suplement to the Sunday papers.” (It will set you back as much as $35,000 today).

The job was more successful, although McClure was a mercurial and difficult boss. Cather stepped in after Steffens and Tarbell left, and worked for him, at first primarily on editing and revising a profile of the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, which would be later published by Doubleday as a book which, although it does not contain her name, was basically ghostwritten by Cather.  ($2450 ) This is also when she met Annie Fields (wife of James T. Fields, a publisher at Ticknor & Fields), and Sarah Orne Jewett, other figures often mentioned in her biographies, who encouraged her to focus on writing fiction.

She took their advice, and anonymously submitted to the publication she worked for, McClure’s, a novel, using a pseudonyn.  Alexander’s Bridge is about an industrialist, and set in London and Boston. She revealed herself as the author after it was accepted for serialization (She did the same thing with another manuscript, which was rejected; she then destroyed it). She also sent a revised version to an editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet, who accepted it the next day, comparing Alexander’s  Bridge to Wharton’s novels.

Houghton Mifflin got the book cheap: it would not need to put many resources into promoting the book, as McClure’s was going to publish it serially and do the marketing. The press could even use the illustrations McClure’s would commission. Greenslet didn’t think the novel would make the press much money—he estimated sales of 4,000—but did think Cather had a future as a more commercially successful author for them, if they worked together on subsequent books.

Alexander’s Bridge was published in 1912, seven years after her previous book. Cather would later try to expunge the history of this novel from her record, deciding the book was subpar and derivative, and instead claim that O, Pioneers! was her first novel. “Soon after the book was published I went for six months to Arizona and New Mexico. The longer I stayed in a country I really did care about, and among people who were part of the country, the more unnecessay and superficial a book like Alexander’s Bridge seemed to me.” She had predicted, wrongly, that a first novel set in glitzy locales would be “more engaging than, let us say, Gopher Prairie,; even if the writer knows Gopher Prairie very well, and London very casually.” ($15,000)

She wrote O Pioneers! quickly, and sent it to Greenslee, who accepted it immediately. It published in 1913. It was a critical success:  “The sureness of feeling and touch, the power without straing…lift it far about the ordinary product of contemporary novelists,” wrote The Nation. There were numerous such raves by many critics. It was her fourth book, her second novel, and her third publisher. She made a bit of money from it, but not enough to not need a day job and a good advance to write another one. (The next novel would be Song of the Lark, which she wrongly predicted would sell 30,0000 copies, but was neither a critical nor financial success). It would be another decade, when Cather was in her fifties,  before she would write a money-making novel, One of Ours. Hemingway and Edmund Wilson both panned it at great length, and those critiques sent Cather into a depression. But for this novel she would win the Pulitzer and sell so many copies she never had to worry about money again. A great deal of the success of this novel is arguably due to her jump from Greenslee and Houghton Mifflin, which launched her career, to a newly founded, buzzy press run by Alfred Knopf, which (and who), at Cather’s insistence (she was very involved in the publicizing and selling of her work) sunk more marketing dollars into launching that novel than Houghton Mifflin had her previous ones.

Stay tuned for the 2nd half of Cather’s publication history tk!

1. Most research from the amazing Willa Cather archives, a project that puts the lie to anyone who denigrates digital humanities and (ahem) anyone who underestimates the value of transcribing and digitizing handwritten archival materials. I also used two recent biographies of Cather, by Hermione Lee and Benjamin Taylor, although neither spend much time on the publication history. A main goal I have here is to see what happens if we write a “biography” of Cather entirely through her publication history, as opposed to other aspects of her biography that are more commonly written about and better-known.