Willa Cather, best-known as the author of O Pioneers!, My Antonia and Death Comes for The Archbishop published Youth and the Bright Medusa, a collection of her short fiction, in 1920. According to Alfred Knopf, Cather had been displeased with the dull brown covers of O Pioneers! and My Antonia, and upon seeing the bright blue Chinese cloth Knopf had purchased to cover other hardcovers, immediately handed him the manuscript of Youth and the Bright Medusa. Also in Knopf's belief, Willa Cather cared nothing for how much she would be paid for her work, but rather for fame and positive attention. Youth and the Bright Medusa is a collection of eight stories of artistic endeavor, told in Cather's clear and lucid prose. Fans of Cather's novels may well be enthralled by this collection, which in its quiet simplicity is as elegant and insightful as anything the author ever wrote.

Author Biography

Willa Sibert Cather (1873 - 1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.