This collection brings together all of Willa Cather’s short fiction published in book form in her lifetime, along with two volumes of stories that were compiled after her death and published with the approval of the literary executor of her estate.
The Troll Garden (1905) was Willa Cather’s first book of prose and consisted of seven short stories. Four of these stories—“The Sculptor’s Funeral,” “A Death in the Desert,” “A Wagner Matinée,” and “Paul’s Case”—were later revised and rearranged (the revised versions appear in this volume) and were included in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) with four others that Cather had written between 1916 and 1920. The three stories of her next collection, Obscure Destinies (1932), were written between 1924 and the time of the book’s publication.
Willa Cather completed three additional stories, which were published for the first time in The Old Beauty and Others (1948) in the year following her death. A final collection, Five Stories, published by Vintage Books in 1956, brought together short fiction spanning Cather’s career. It consisted of three previously published stories (“Neighbour Rosicky,” “The Best Years,” and the revised “Paul’s Case”); “The Enchanted Bluff,” an early work, previously uncollected; “Tom Outland’s Story,” which forms Book II of The Professor’s House; and George N. Kate’s article on Willa Cather’s unfinished Avignon story.