A Death in the Desert

Infobox short story |
name = A Death in the Desert
title_orig =
translator =
author = Willa Cather
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre =
published_in = Scribner's Magazine
publication_type = Magazine
publisher =
media_type =
pub_date = 1903
english_pub_date =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"A Death in the Desert" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in "The Scribner's" in January 1903 [Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, University of Nebraska Press; Rev Ed edition, 1 Nov 1970, page 217] .

Plot summary

Everett is on a train from Holdrege, Nebraska to Cheyenne, Wyoming. A man mistakes him for his brother Adriance, a famous artist. On the way to his hotel a woman in a phaeton lets out a shriek as she believes it must be his brother. The next day the man he'd met on the train meets him at his hotel and says his sister, Katharine Gaylord, who was on the carriage the night before, would like to talk to him as she used to work for his brother. He remembers her. They take a carriage to the Gaylords's, and Charley warns him she is ill. During their interview Katharine asks after some gossip concerning people she knew from his brother; he apologises for being curt when he was younger, out of admiration. She says he resembles Adriance far more than he did before, and they dwell on Adriance some more.

Later Everett thinks back to a time when he saw his brother and Katharine perform, and how he felt excluded from it. He then writes a letter to his brother, to tell him he has met Katharine again. Upon his next visit, she has received a letter from Adriance, who is in Granada. She asks him to read the letter out to her and to play the sonata he has sent her. She admits to having always loved Adriance. He says he loves her, but she brushes it away for being too tragic a fate, as she is dying. Upon dying, she holds his day and calls him 'Adriance'. Finally, he takes a train out of Cheyenne and when someone calls him Adriance he tells them that is his brother.

Characters

*Everett Hilgarde
*Charley Gaylord
*Two girls on the train.
*Adriance Hilgarde
*Katharine Gaylord
*Maggie Gaylord
*The Parson
*Diana, a chaste actress in New York City.

Allusions to other works

*Katharine Gaylord mentions Richard Wagner's "Das Rheingold", Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and Heinrich Heine's "Florentine Nights".

Moreover, Gussie Davis's song "In The Baggage Coach Ahead" is mentioned - albeit 'in' is elided [Stouck, David, 'Review of "The Troll Garden", by Willa Cather', Great Plains Quarterly, 4:278] .

Literary significance and criticism

It has been argued that the title of the story was influenced by Willa Cather's reading of Robert Browning [Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xi] .

Allusions to Alexandre Dumas, fils' "La dame aux camelias" and Lucretius's "De rerum natura" have also been found [Woodress, James, "The Troll Garden" by Willa Cather, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983b, p. 126] .

References

External links

* [http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/examples/servlet/transform/tamino/Library/cather?&_xmlsrc=http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/cather/writings/cat.ss012/cat.ss012.xml&_xslsrc=http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/cather/xslt/cather_ss.xsl Full Text]