Recovering the extra-literary: The Pittsburgh writings of Willa Cather

Willa Cather believed literature and journalism were separate and unequal genres. During her decade in Pittsburgh (1896--1906), as she gained recognition as a literary artist, she increasingly censored her early journalism and apprentice fiction. My dissertation promotes the recovery of these writings, especially the unsigned and pseudonymous pieces contained in two affiliated journals she served as an editor: Home Monthly and the National Stockman and Farmer. My first chapter describes more than forty additional items from Home Monthly and the Stockman, including poetry, short fiction, and editorials. Annotated tables of contents and contributors' lists for both journals (1896---97) and maps and period photographs are offered in appendices.; Employing the methodology of New Historicism, my dissertation returns little regarded works to their approximate contexts of publication. Chapter 2 reads Cather's story "The Conversion of Sum Loo" (1900) as part of the debate over proselytizing the Chinese within the Library, a Pittsburgh magazine whose brief life (Spring and Summer of 1900) coincided with the Boxer rebellion in North China. "Sum Loo," it argues, is a satire upon recent events linking China and Pittsburgh's small Chinese colony.; The third chapter recovers a journalistic prototype for a story Cather held among her most "literary." Although Cather preferred to say "Paul's Case" (1905) was inspired by her teaching experience, she borrowed its plot from the city papers of November 1902, which reported the theft of {dollar}1,500 from the offices of the Denny Estate by two Pittsburgh boys. This chapter examines not only Cather's adaptation of extra-literary sources, but also her ambivalence toward her first career in journalism.; The final chapter concerns two late novellas, "Uncle Valentine" (1922) and "Double Birthday" (1929), written more than a decade after Cather's last physical visit to the city. Both use her memories of Pittsburgh and Allegheny City at the turn of the century to attack suburbanization and class stratification, twin problems that she thought were eroding the nation's social fabric in the 1920s.