Benjamin Taylor has a thing for Willa Cather. This year, the 150th anniversary of her birth, he has written a passionate love letter to her in the form of a brief but illuminating biography. “Chasing Bright Medusas” clocks in at just over 150 pages but it offers a fine introduction to one of the leading novelists of the American frontier.
Taylor, a prize-winning author who also penned short books about Philip Roth and Marcel Proust, argues that Cather’s move at age 9 from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where for the first time she encountered Jews, Norwegians, Mexicans and immigrants of all kinds, was a foundational event that “made her a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial.”
