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  • Willa Cather in the Denver Times in 1915 and New Evidence of the Origins of The Professor's House
  • Melissa J. Homestead

In Willa Cather Living, Edith Lewis's memoir of her partner of nearly forty years, she describes the journey that she and Cather made to visit the cliff-dweller ruins in Mesa Verde in Colorado in 1915, identifying their experiences as the source for "Tom Outland's Story," a section of Cather's novel The Professor's House. Lewis notes that "Willa Cather had long wished to visit the Mesa Verde, in the southwestern corner of Colorado," but she also claims that Cather "loved the Southwest for its own sake. She did not go there with any express purpose of writing about it—of 'gathering material,' as they say, for a story" (94, 101). In From Mesa Verde to The Professor's House, David Harrell's extensive source study of The Professor's House, he surmises that, contra Lewis, Cather designed the trip as a "deliberate research venture" (43). When Cather and Lewis were on their way to Mesa Verde but had not yet reached it, journalist Margaret Harvey interviewed Cather in Denver, and her account of the interview appeared in the Denver Times on 16 August 1915. This interview, reprinted here for the first time, substantiates Harrell's surmise that Cather went to Mesa Verde to gather material for her fiction. The recovery of the interview contributes new information concerning Cather's engagement with the Southwest and the origins of The Professor's House as well as to the ongoing scholarly reevaluation of Cather's approach to writing.

There was a significant time lapse between Cather's Mesa Verde trip and her use of the material in a novel published in 1925, although for a few years after 1915 she mentioned working on a story called "The Blue Mesa." On 22 August 1916 she first wrote to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin, about "The Blue Mesa," calling it a "story of the Southwest" and predicting she [End Page 187] would finish it "by the end of next year." She mentioned it again several times to Greenslet and his colleague Roger Scaife through 1917, but she put it and the Southwest as fictional subject matter aside to write her Nebraska novel My Ántonia (1918). She mentioned "The Blue Mesa" again to her brother Roscoe Cather on 8 December 1918, after My Ántonia was out and reviewed, writing that she was "wrestling with the Blue Mesa story a little; but the commonplace way to do it is so utterly manufactured, and the only way worth while is so alarmingly difficult." Perhaps deterred by the difficulty, she turned to writing One of Ours, her novel set in Nebraska and in World War I France. Scholars have long hypothesized that, despite the long chronological gap between her period of active work on "The Blue Mesa" and her writing of The Professor's House, "The Blue Mesa" represented in embryo what became the central "Tom Outland's Story" section of the novel.1 Harvey's interview with Cather provides additional weight to this hypothesis.

In addition to drawing on her own experiences of the place in "Tom Outland's Story," Cather fictionalized (and romanticized) the so-called discovery of the Mesa Verde ruins by the Wetherill brothers in the late nineteenth century. Her January 1916 Denver Times article "Mesa Verde Wonderland Is Easy to Reach," recovered by Bernice Slote and Susan Rosowski in 1986, refers to the Wetherills and describes their first encounter with the ruins in a way that prefigures her later treatment of Tom Outland's discovery of similar ruins. It had always seemed peculiar to me that Cather wrote this article about Mesa Verde for a Denver paper, but her contact with a Denver Times reporter in August 1915 makes sense of the appearance of this key document in that venue. Crucially, the 1915 Denver Times interview that set the stage for Cather's 1916 Denver Times essay documents an encounter between two western women: Harvey, a young journalist at the beginning of her career, and Cather, a former journalist and magazine editor who had recently left...

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