Writer Willa Cather Celebrated Europeans Who Settled in the American Midwest

Like all good writers, she wanted her novels to show the world she described, not just tell about it.  Later in her life, she described the way she wrote.  She called it "novels without furniture."  What she meant was that she removed from her novels everything that was not necessary to tell the story.  Fiction in the nineteenth century was filled with social detail.  It had pages of description and comments by the author.  Cather did not write this way.  She looked to the past for her ideas, but she drew from the present for her art.