A Death in the Desert

Last updated
"A Death in the Desert"
Author Willa Cather
Country United States
Language English
Published in Scribner's Magazine
Publication type Magazine
Publication date 1903

"A Death in the Desert" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in The Scribner's in January 1903. [1]

Willa Cather American writer and novelist

Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

<i>Scribners Magazine</i>

Scribner's Magazine was an American periodical published by the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons from January 1887 to May 1939. Scribner's Magazine was the second magazine out of the Scribner's firm, after the publication of Scribner's Monthly. Charles Scribner's Sons spent over $500,000 setting up the magazine, to compete with the already successful Harper's Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly. Scribner's Magazine was launched in 1887, and was the first of any magazine to introduce color illustrations. The magazine ceased publication in 1939.

Contents

Plot summary

Everett is on a train from Holdrege, Nebraska to Cheyenne, Wyoming. He is a man that looks like his older prodigy brother Adriance--this similarity haunts him throughout the entire novel and robs him of his own personality. He will always be Adriance's brother.

Holdrege, Nebraska City in Nebraska, United States

Holdrege is a city in Phelps County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 5,495 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Phelps County. The Nebraska Prairie Museum is located in Holdrege.

Cheyenne, Wyoming State capital and city in Wyoming, United States

Cheyenne is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Wyoming and the county seat of Laramie County. It is the principal city of the Cheyenne, Wyoming, Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Laramie County. The population was 59,466 at the 2010 census. Cheyenne is the northern terminus of the extensive and fast-growing Front Range Urban Corridor that stretches from Cheyenne to Pueblo, Colorado which has a population of 4,333,742 according to the 2010 United States Census. Cheyenne is situated on Crow Creek and Dry Creek. The Cheyenne, Wyoming Metropolitan Area had a 2010 population of 91,738, making it the 354th-most populous metropolitan area in the United States.

Characters

New York City Largest city in the United States

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States and thus also in the state of New York. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

Allusions to other works

Richard Wagner German composer

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.

<i>Das Rheingold</i> opera by Richard Wagner

Das Rheingold, WWV 86A, is the first of the four music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen,. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 22 September 1869, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, on 13 August 1876.

Edward Gibbon English historian and Member of Parliament

Edward Gibbon FRS was an English historian, writer and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788 and is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organised religion.

Moreover, Gussie Davis's song In The Baggage Coach Ahead is mentioned - albeit 'in' is elided. [2]

Gussie Davis American musician

Gussie Lord Davis was an African-American songwriter born in Dayton, Ohio. Davis was one of America's earliest successful African-American music artists, the first Black songwriter to become famous on Tin Pan Alley as a composer of popular music.

Literary significance and criticism

It has been argued that the title of the story was influenced by Willa Cather's reading of Robert Browning. [3]

Robert Browning English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.

Allusions to Alexandre Dumas, fils' La dame aux camelias and Lucretius's De rerum natura have also been found. [4]

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References

  1. ↑ Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, University of Nebraska Press; Rev Ed edition, 1 Nov 1970, page 217
  2. ↑ Stouck, David, 'Review of The Troll Garden, by Willa Cather', Great Plains Quarterly, 4:278
  3. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xi
  4. ↑ Woodress, James, The Troll Garden by Willa Cather, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983b, p. 126
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