She has written four novels. You pick up _Alexander’s Bridge_ and read with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It is--excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon another book by the same author and start to read. Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather better than a filled one). _O Pioneers!_ is in its way an epic of the Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though intensely satisfied with _O Pioneers!_ you never for a moment expect more of her--perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would be in any way reasonable. A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker than _O Pioneers!_ as _O Pioneers!_ was thicker than _Alexander’s Bridge_. It is called _The Song of the Lark_. You eye it speculatively. You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again. _The Song of the Lark_ is a much bigger thing than her second novel in every respect except one--it has not the same peculiar quality of seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of America in the period of that life. But wait--think a moment. Does not this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the fight--what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever lived? From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable wonder of the woman who could--and did--write them. But here no wonder lies. At least, you may read the external record of Willa Sibert Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any.