Willa Gather

flashback

Vanity Fair July 1927

She had just completed Death Comes for the Archbishop when Vanity Fair declared Willa Cather "the heir apparent to Edith Wharton's lonely eminence among America's women novelists.'' But up to that time, you could hardly have called her unanointed. Four years before, she had captured the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, making her, at the time of this photograph, the only woman on earth besides Wharton to have received the honor. This spring, the Archbishop gets a second coming, as Random House's Modem Library series resurrects the Pioneer's paean to her beloved American Southwest.