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.