Troll Garden, The and One of Ours: Manuscript and Corrected Typescript Blurbs.
Manuscript and Typescript
Promotional Blurbs
[Cather, Willa]. [Unidentified editor]. Manuscript promotional blurb for The Troll Garden. N.d. [but ca. 1905 or perhaps later].
1 leaf, ink, recto only.
Together with:
Cather, Willa. Annotations and revisions to a typescript blurb for One of Ours. N.d. [ca. 1922].
Manuscript blurb, likely by Cather’s editor on The Troll Garden at McClure Phillips, but composed years later for a retrospective edition; together with a typescript blurb bearing Cather’s underlining, deletions, and manuscript revisions.
The manuscript on the stories reads in full:
These stories, when they came to me from a totally unknown writer, affected me as the Every story in The Troll Garden expression each in a different field of the hunger and aspiration of the artist. It is this quality that gives the book its unity and charm. It is true also, that the author was unconscious that the stories expressed these longings for artistic fulfillment. No single story can be spared, each is a necessary fragment of expression. These stories are masterpieces, there is nothing to indicate that they were the early work of the author.
The typescript, with Cather’s underlining, strike-outs, and bold revisions, reads as follows:
More and more have we come to recognize in Miss Cather our greatest living woman novelist. One of Ours, a work to which she has devoted four solid years (she is one of the few writers today who refuses to be hurried), is her first novel since 1918. A most brilliant and moving book – it shows her at the very fullness of her powers. It is a more difficult tale by far than she has ever before set herself, this intimate story of a young man’s life, but she has carried it through triumphantly. This, Here, you will say, is an authentic masterpiece – a novel to rank with the finest of this or any age.
All the magic of Miss Cather’s subtle and flexible style, all the passion of her daring, impatient mind, are lavished upon the presentation of a single figure – a sort of young Hamlet of the prairie – and upon the haunting story of his struggle with life and fate. The action is swift; each episode is handled with bold decisiveness. Claude Wheeler’s stormy youth, his enigmatic marriage, and the his final adventure which finally releases the baffled energy of the boy’s nature, are given in a succession of scenes that outwardly told with an almost [ ] simplicity have to do with the simplest details of every-day life. But behind the personal drama there is an ever-deepening sense of national drama, of national character, working itself out through individuals and their destiny.
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