“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”

This striking observation comes from “Oh Pioneers,” a 1913 novel by Willa Cather, who was born on December 7, 1873 and is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, an 8-cent stamp issued in 1973. (This wasn’t one of the stamps my father carefully mounted in one of his notebooks; rather it was one of the many that stuffed into folders and manila envelopes that also were part of his “collection.”)

While I’d certainly heard of Cather before writing this post, I don’t remember reading her work. It appears I’ve been missing something because Cather was one of America’s premier writers in the first part of the 20th century. “One of Ours” her 1923 novel telling the story of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native killed in World War I, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. And “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” a 1927 novel about a Catholic bishop and a priest who try to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory =was included on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

Cather had an especially keen eye for place, people, and meaning. In “My Antonia,” her popular 1918 novel, for example, an orphaned boy looks out from a wagon in Nebraska and finds “there seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land….I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven all there was of it….I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

From today’s perspective, Cather is especially noteworthy because she was one of the few writers to include the pandemic that killed about 50 million people in 1918 and 1919 in her work. (She did so in “One of Ours,” other noteworthy accounts, all of them written after Cather’s book, are in Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel ,” William Maxwell’s “They Came Like Swallows,” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.”)

The account in “One of Ours,” which draws on a diary kept by a doctor she knew, describes how the illness killed many people on a troop ship. “At eleven o’clock one of the Kansas men came to tell Claude that his corporal was going fast,” Cather wrote. “Big Tannhauser’s fever had left him, but so had everything else. He lay in a stupor. His congested eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish whites were visible. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out at one side. From the end of the corridor Claude had heard the frightful sounds that came from his throat, sounds like violent vomiting, or the choking rattle of a man in strangulation-and, indeed, he was being strangled. One of the band boys brought Claude a camp chair, and said kindly, ‘He doesn’t suffer. It’s mechanical now. He’d go easier if he hadn’t so much vitality. The doctor says he may have a few moments of consciousness just at the last, if you want to stay.’

After three o’clock the noise of struggle ceased; instantly the huge figure on the bed became again his good-natured corporal. The mouth closed, the glassy jellies were once more seeing, intelligent human eyes. The face lost its swollen, brutish look and was again the face of a friend. It was almost unbelievable that anything so far gone could come back. He looked up wistfully at his lieutenant as if to ask him something. His eyes filled with tears, and he turned his head away a little.

‘Mein ‘arme Mutter!’ he whispered distinctly.

A few moments later he died in perfect dignity, not struggling under torture, but consciously, it seemed to Claude-like a brave boy giving back what was not his to keep.”

In the 1910s and 1920s such writing made Cather a commercial and critical success. H. L. Mencken, who initially criticized her writing, later praised her for writing in plainspoken language about ordinary people and Sinclair Lewis hailed her for making “the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done.” By the 1930s, however, critics began to attack her work. Granville Hicks, for example, asserted that she failed confront “contemporary life as it is” and instead escaped into an idealized past. But in the late 20th century, a new generation of critics reclaimed her legacy. Writing in 1986, for example, Susan J. Rosowski contended that Cather was “the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature.” A decade later, Joseph Urgo asserted that Cather felt a connection between the immigrants’ “sense of homelessness and exile” and her own feelings of exile when her family had moved from Virginia to Nebraska when she was a child.

I wonder what Cather would have thought of these more contemporary observations. She once wrote, for example, “what was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?” I also was by this passage from “My Antonio,” in which she wrote: “”I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air; or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

So, it appears, there may be – and should be – some Willa Cather on my winter reading list.

Be well, stay safe, seek out those elusive elements that are life itself, fight for justice and work for peace.