Willa Cather, the Greatest American Novelist?

I’ve sampled Willa Cather recently after a knowledgeable friend suggested she might be a sleeper candidate for the greatest American novelist. Well, after reading My Antonia and The Professor’s House I have to say, I don’t see it. There are particular things about both books that did not grab me, but to sum up my reaction, I’ll borrow a concept from Harold Bloom, who wrote in his introduction to The Western Canon that one quality shared by all canonical texts is their fundamental strangeness, their unlikeness to anything that came before them. I just did not find there to be much at all strange about either Cather novel.

I did, though, find her writing to be affecting and original when depicting the landscapes of her stories – the American southwest in The Professor’s House and the Nebraska plains in My Antonia. She has a talent for melding her characters with their surroundings, so that their lives appear as consequential, and as fleeting, as a summer’s growth of corn. From My Antonia:

The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces.