Cather

For her, it was essential to keep the artwork itself unclouded by ideological notions, firmly in the crosshairs — this belief is at the heart of her monograph on “Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism.”

Cather was also struck by his younger sisters, writing to her nieces that the girls, Hephzibah and Yaltah, musicians too, were “almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he.”

The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

White: Willa Cather is a good example, too.

Cather, whose works include “My Ántonia” and “O Pioneers,” spent her young years in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895.