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Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Mormon fiction is generally fiction by or about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who are also referred to as Latter-day Saints or Mormons. Its history is commonly divided into four sections as first organized by Eugene England: foundations, home literature, the "lost" generation, and faithful realism. During the first fifty years of the church's existence, 1830–1880, fiction was not popular, though Parley P. Pratt wrote a fictional Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the Devil. With the emergence of the novel and short stories as popular reading material, Orson F. Whitney called on fellow members to write inspirational stories. During this "home literature" movement, church-published magazines published many didactic stories and Nephi Anderson wrote the novel Added Upon. The generation of writers after the home literature movement produced fiction that was recognized nationally but was seen as rebelling against home literature's outward moralization. Vardis Fisher's Children of God and Maurine Whipple's The Giant Joshua were prominent novels from this time period. In the 1970s and 1980s, authors started writing realistic fiction as faithful members of the LDS Church. Acclaimed examples include Levi S. Peterson's The Backslider and Linda Sillitoe's Sideways to the Sun. Home literature experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s when church-owned Deseret Book started to publish more fiction, including Gerald Lund's historical fiction series The Work and the Glory and Jack Weyland's novels.
Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
"Paul's Case" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1905 under the title "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament", which was later shortened. It also appeared in a collection of Cather's stories, The Troll Garden (1905). For many years "Paul's Case" was the only one of her stories that Cather allowed to be anthologized.
Ardessa is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Century in May 1918.
On the Divide is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Overland Monthly in January 1896.
The Affair at Grover Station is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Library in June 1900 in two installments, and reprinted in the Lincoln Courier one month later. The story is about a geological student asking an old friend of his about the recent murder of a station agent.
The Namesake is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's in March 1907.
The Association for Mormon Letters (AML) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1976 to "foster scholarly and creative work in Mormon letters and to promote fellowship among scholars and writers of Mormon literature." Other stated purposes have included promoting the "production and study of Mormon literature" and the encouragement of quality writing "by, for, and about Mormons." The broadness of this definition of LDS literature has led the AML to focus on a wide variety of work that has sometimes been neglected in the Mormon community. It publishes criticism on such writing, hosts an annual conference, and offers awards to works of fiction, poetry, essay, criticism, drama, film, and other genres. It published the literary journal Irreantum from 1999 to 2013 and currently publishes an online-only version of the journal, which began in 2018. The AML's blog, Dawning of a Brighter Day, launched in 2009. As of 2012, the association also promotes LDS literature through the use of social media. The AML has been described as an "influential proponent of Mormon literary fiction."
Marilyn McMeen Miller Brown is an American novelist best known for her work within her native Mormon culture. She is the creator and namesake of the Marilyn Brown Novel Award.
Richard Holton Cracroft was an author and emeritus professor of English at Brigham Young University (BYU) where he held the title of Nan Osmond Grass Professor in English and spent time as head of BYU's English department and as dean of the College of Humanities. He directed BYU's American Studies Program (1989–1994), directed the Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature and edited the seminal A Believing People anthology, a landmark in Mormon letters. His devotion to the field is most famously summed up in his Association for Mormon Letters presidential address "Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophic Tide in LDS Literature" and his long-running column "Book Nook" in BYU Magazine which demonstrated the breadth of Mormon literature to a wide audience.
Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill is an American academic. She is a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University (BYU). From 1994 to 2010, she was the director of the BYU Women's Research Institute.
Murray Boren is a composer of opera, symphonic, chamber, and vocal works. He has written nine operas and over 100 songs and chamber compositions. He also contributed to the Joseph Sonnets. Among his operas are Book of Gold and Emma; both are based on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints history. In 2007, he retired from his position as composer-in-residence at the College of Music of the College of Fine Arts and Communications of Brigham Young University (BYU).
Neal Elwood Lambert is an emeritus professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University (BYU). His most notable work was A Believing People: Literature of Latter-day Saints an anthology co-edited with Richard Cracroft.
Camille Fronk Olson is a retired professor and former chair of Brigham Young University's (BYU) Department of Ancient Scripture in Religious Education and a scholar who has written multiple books on the role of women in the scriptures. She has also spoken widely in various forums on Latter-day Saint beliefs, especially as they relate to women.
Bernice Slote, a Willa Cather scholar, was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The Elopement of Allen Poole is a short story by Willa Cather, first published in 1893 by The Hesperian while she was a student. The story itself deals with the character of Allen Poole, who is shot by an officer on the night of his elopement with his partner, Nell.
The Best Years is a short story by Willa Cather, first published after her death in the collection The Old Beauty and Others in 1948. It is her final work, and was intended as a gift to her brother, Roscoe Cather, who died as it was being written. Set in Nebraska and the northeastern United States, the story takes place over twenty years, tracing the response of Lesley Ferguesson's family to her death in a snowstorm.
Gertrude Hall, also known as Gertrude Hall Brownell, was an American writer of poems, short stories, novels, and nonfiction. She also translated works from the French. She was the second wife of American art and literary critic William Crary Brownell (1851–1928), whose work she anthologized and annotated after his death.
Nothing Very Important and Other Stories is a collection of interconnected short stories written by Béla Petsco and self-published in 1979 with illustrations by his friend Kathryn Clark-Spencer. The stories are about missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints working in Southern California. Signature Books reprinted the book in 1984 under their Orion imprint. Petsco wrote the stories for his master's thesis at Brigham Young University (BYU). The book won the 1979 Association for Mormon Letters award for short fiction. The stories were adapted for theater and performed in 1983, but without BYU's endorsement.
