of Grass." So I cling to the reminiscence for its symbolic truth.
Looking back through the seven novels to discover the newcomer from the West, I see a young Nebraskan, hungry from the austerities and rectitudes of a prairie home, reading the "Leaves of Grass" in the morning sunshine on a bench in Washington Square and dreaming of the western pioneers and of Paris, dreaming of a world richer, fuller, freer than our fathers knew, a world enriched by the development of perceptions of beauty which in them were but rudimentary, and enriched by the liberation of powers which they did not value or which they feared and suppressed. With that much by way of biography, one can in some fashion "account" for everything that she has written.
Her first book, "Alexander's Bridge," 1912, is more significantly hers than she admits. It is a short novel presenting a "crucial moment" in the career of Bartley Alexander. He was by the gift of the gods a tremendous natural force, a great man of action. He came out of the West and distinguished himself as a bridge builder. He married a fine woman of talent and fortune and settled firmly into the imposing structure of established society in Boston. But in his dangerous middle age his unexhausted youth fermented within him. He renewed a liaison of his student days with an Irish actress in London. When he returned to inspect his biggest bridge, then building, it collapsed and he was drowned in its ruin.
In 1922, eleven years after the composition of this tale, Miss Cather wrote an apologetic but extremely interesting preface for a new edition. She said that
