Daryl W. Palmer is an author and professor of English at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.

• IntroductionChapter 1. Red Cloud and the "Real West": Mapping Willa Cather's Territorial ImaginationChapter 2 Writing the West Otherwise: The Short Stories of the First Decade, 1892-1902Chapter 3. The Road from April Twilights into the Far CountryChapter 4. "a ride through a familiar country": The Different Process of O Pioneers! and the Emergence of Willa CatherChapter 5. Emergence, Experimentation, and Evolution: The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, and the Fiction that Followed Out WestA Note on Texts and AbbreviationsWorks CitedAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author

I cannot think of any Cather volume quite like this one. It is a welcome and innovative contribution to the existing literature. This book will appeal to the broad cross-section of committed lay readers as well as to practicing scholars." - Timothy W. Bintrim, Professor of English, Saint Francis University"Becoming Willa Cather sets out to account for Willa Cather's emergence as a major figure in American writing in the first half of the twentieth century—in recent years it has become clear that she is arguably the preeminent novelist of the 1920s and 1930s, and perhaps the first half of the twentieth century. Only Faulkner contends with her. Throughout, the book demonstrates that the West generally, and Nebraska particularly, was crucial to Cather's emergence as the significant writer she became. Particularly prominent in Becoming Willa Cather are analyses of Cather's early short stories and also some of her poetry, work that has been either unevenly considered (the stories) or almost completely neglected (the poetry) by critics." - Dana Professor of Canadian Studies & English Emeritus, St. Lawrence University