The trip also began a love affair with ancient cliff dwellings and the desert that would play a central role in later novels such as 1925’s The Professor’s House and 1927’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.īut the most powerful and direct effect emerged in the first novel she began after returning from Walnut Canyon. It gave her imagination a jump-start that prompted her to complete her first mature novel, 1913’s O Pioneers!, which established her as the premier novelist of the Great Plains.

But her stop in Walnut Canyon shortly after proved inspirational in a way that would have a long reach across her career. Her first stop in the Southwest, Winslow, Arizona, held little promise for emotional or literary transformation-she bemoaned the “ugly little western town” in a letter. After this trip, she would all but disown it. But, as a novelist, she was struggling she had produced one novel that she was dissatisfied with.

She was working as a writer and editor at McClure’s magazine, one of the most prestigious publications in the United States, and established as part of New York’s literary demimonde. At that moment she was a successful writer, but uncertain of her next step. The author Willa Cather arrived in Flagstaff for the first time in the spring of 1912, eager to take all of this in. Climb below onto its trails for a closer look as curved divots in the rock walls emerge-home for a thriving civilization nine hundred years earlier. Now preserved as Walnut Canyon National Monument, it is full of breathtaking vistas from its rim, you can see the curve and flow of volcanic rock that runs hundreds of feet below.

Song of the willa cather