Willa Cather and Six Writers from the Great War

In Willa Cather and Six Writers from the Great War, James Kirschke traces Willa Cather's inspiration for the character, Tom Outland, in her 1925 novel, The Professor's House. Outland is a brilliant young man from the Southwest who dies as a soldier in the Great War. Most authorities on Willa Cather's work presume that inspiration for Outland arose from a trip Cather made to Southern Colorado in the summer of 1915. James Kirschke shows that some of the young poets of World War I may be a part of that inspiration. This book is therefore also an introduction to six young 'Tom Outlands' who died during WWI: Charles Sorley, Arthur Graeme West, Edwin Vaughan, Edward Wyndham Tennant, Alan Seeger, and Victor Chapman. The book also includes studies on the diary as an art form, of her trip to Mesa Verde in Colorado, and her connection to Victor Chapman's Letters from France and Alan Seeger's family. Co-published with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.