Review of \u3ci\u3eYouth and the Bright Medusa\u3c/i\u3e by Willa Cather

The Great Plains launched Willa Cather\u27s career. Her multilayered imagining of frontier folk in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) placed the region-and the noveliston the literary map. In 1920, Youth and the Bright Medusa combined recent urban stories Coming, Aphrodite!, The Diamond Mine, \u27\u27A Gold Slipper, Scandal -with four stories from 1905\u27s Troll Garden anthology- Paul\u27s Case, A Wagner Matinee, The Sculptor\u27s Funeral, and \u27A Death in the Desert.\u27 Youth and the Bright Medusa explores dilemmas arising from pursuit of the shining Medusa of art. Can pure art reconcile with commercial acceptance? Will a singer survive her parasitic entourage? Who controls celebrity image? The final three stories add a geographical dimension to artistic tensions as they unflinchingly juxtapose provincial West with cosmopolitan East: a Nebraska homesteader agonizingly reconnects with Boston\u27s music scene; a deceased sculptor is returned to his barren Kansas hometown; a consumptive diva combats isolation on Wyoming\u27s High Plains. Cather\u27s collection, with its celebration of urban settings and unflattering portrayals of Plains life, seems almost to abandon admiration of western landscapes