Willa Cather’s Nobility

Chasing Bright Medusas is a splendid book, elegantly formulated, casually authoritative, admirably concise, offering a balanced account of a writer I believe the best American novelist of the past century. As its author Benjamin Taylor recounts, Willa Cather did not always receive the most hospitable reception from some of the leading literary critics of her day. But she now no longer needs them, having found full acceptance from that greatest and most stringent of all critics, Time itself, for today, more than 75 years after her death in 1947, her novels and short stories remain immensely readable and significant in a way that Ernest Hemingway's and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and others once better thought of than hers no longer do. No one sets out deliberately to write for the ages, but Willa Cather seems to have done just that.