Willa Cather: A Conversation with Chris Benfey and Ben Taylor

On Sunday, March 3, on the occasion of concluding our winter reading of Willa Cather’s My Àntonia with critic and literary historian Chris Benfey, we were delighted to host a virtual conversation with Chris along with Benjamin Taylor, author of the recent book, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. Here’s a recording for those who couldn’t join us.

Chris Benfey is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age, including The Great Wave and A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, and the family memoir Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. He has edited The American Writings of Lafcadio Hearn and the complete poems of Stephen Crane for Library of America and essays on the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff for New York Review Classics. 

Benjamin Taylor is also the author of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Proust: The Search (Jewish Lives), Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay and the novels Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, and the stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing.

Ann Kjellberg (moderator) is the founding editor of Book Post.

We were joined by:
Peter C. Meilaender, author of the recent essay “Willa Cather and the ‘Antique Virtues’” Wartime idealism and the search for meaning in her Pulitzer-winning novel ‘One of Ours.’”

Anthony Domestico, whose reviews for Book Post can be found here.

Laird Hunt, whose essay on visiting Red Cloud appeared in his volume of essays This Wide Terraqueous World. His novels about rural Indiana include Zorrie, Indiana, Indiana, and The Evening Road.

Abby Rosebrock, whose essay on writing for theater, “Playwriting as Labor and Literature,” appeared in Book Post. Her plays featuring rural women are Blue Ridge, Dido of Idaho, and Singles in Agriculture.

and other readers who joined us in the comments in the course of the reading group. We were so grateful to all for their participation!

(A note about the thumbnail photo: We are laughing at the moment when Ben said of Philip Roth, “Cather meant nothing to him.”)