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A Literary And Field Guide To The Trees In Willa Cather’S Nebraska Novels, Linnea M. Fredrickson

Open Access Master's Theses (through 2010)

Willa Cather, one of America’s foremost novelists and short-story writers, was deeply interested in and profoundly affected by the places she lived and encountered. One small aspect of her knowledge of places was familiarity with the trees of the locale. A number of influences during her youth gave her the gift of tree awareness: a great-grandfather who was a forest conservationist, a home in the northern Virginia mixed-deciduous forest that was named for its prominent trees, perhaps the sound of her own first name, the wrenching contrast of a move to the nearly treeless mixed-grass prairie of Nebraska when she …