As she grew older Willa Cather became ever more private, complaining of favor-seekers and other parasites of fame. But in her long career she granted thirty-four interviews, gave six public speeches, and published ten letters, discussing literature and the artistic life and illuminating her own life and writing. These fugitive pieces, here gathered for the first time, reveal the author's early thirst for fame and the reasons for her later renunciation of it.

Included are Cather's radio speech accepting the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (awarded for One of Ours), accounts of her other speeches, interviews conducted by Louise Bogan and Stephen Vincent Benét, and six little-known portraits of Cather.