Looking for Another Willa Cather
In the years following Willa Cather’s death in April 1947, some of her friends and admirers remarked on the meaning and significance of her first book, “April Twilights,” a slim volume of poems that had been published in early 1903 by Richard G. Badger in Boston. Although Badger was clearly a vanity press, as were many better-known publishers then when it came to slim volumes of poems, the firm had also published Edward Arlington Robinson’s first book, and Cather’s, though largely ignored once her fiction had made her reputation, managed a review in the New York Times. Looking back at her friend’s early career from about 1950, the playwright and poet Zöe Akins saw Cather’s beginnings as poet as crucial to the distinctive, clear prose she later produced in her fiction. In 1950, too, Cather’s first biographer, the distinguished Canadian critic E. K. Brown, was in correspondence with Cather’s lifetime friend from university days in Lincoln, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. While weighing the significance of the early poetry, Fisher argued that Cather was throughout her life possessed of a poet’s sensibility, one that is felt throughout her fiction. In 1962 scholar Bernice Slote from the University of Nebraska published “Willa Cather and Her First Book” in her edition of that first book, “April Twilights” (1903), and that essay remains the key study of Cather the poet (revised edition, Nebraska, 1968).
Achieving Sustainable Food Security with Less Water: The Daugherty Water for Food Institute at the University of Nebraska
Agriculture and the water needed to grow crops have always been of critical concern to Nebraskans, but more recently water and food security have surged to the forefront of issues discussed internationally. A current example is Tom Friedman’s column “The Other Arab Spring” in the April 7 issue of the New York Times. Friedman cites the serious droughts and severe crop failures in Syria from 2006 to 2011 and suggests that the resulting tensions over land, water and food were key drivers of social unrest in the region. This situation is not atypical among the world’s most water-scarce countries, many of which are also experiencing significant population growth. More people will need more food and water, and a changing climate brings additional risks. Countries must find ways to provide food security for their growing populations while at the same time ensuring that scarce water resources are conserved, so that they can be used for other critical purposes.
