THE conventional picture of the first novel by Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge (1912), is that it was a misstep in her career, that she was too infatuated with the examples of Henry James and Edith Wharton and had to outgrow a literary manner that ill-suited her before she embraced her most vital material, life on the Nebraska Divide. Cather came into her own, she herself said, when she "hit the home pasture" in her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913). However, this view of the book is guided by the author's own published statements about her motives and her assessments of her creative origins. Because Cather made those three statements over a period of nearly twenty years, it is perhaps prudent to inspect them more closely, for in the absence of manuscripts, galleys, corrected proof sheets, or other forms of prepublication evidence, and with scant reference to Alexander's Bridge in her letters, we are inevitably drawn to Cather's published accounts of her first novel.

All three accounts raise as many questions as they answer. The first occurs in a brief interview in the New York Sun, 25 May 1912, "Literary News, Views, and Criticism" (see Bohlke 6). There, Cather attempts to correct certain misapprehensions of her purposes: Alexander's Bridge is not an "industrial novel"; it is not a story about bridge building, but about a man who happened to build bridges. Nor is the title character patterned after an identifiable person. Instead, Bartley Alexander "simply has some of the characteristics which I have noticed in a dozen architects, engineers and inventors." And the interviewer's suspicion notwithstanding, Hilda Burgoyne does not resemble the actress Hilda Trevelyan. On the contrary, Cather says, she tried "to give the actress in this story certain qualities which I have found oftener in English actresses than in our own." The psychological dimension of the novel is likewise characterized in straightforward fashion: Alexander is a "pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and work and power." He marries a woman of greater sophistication and with "more clearly defined standards," standards he can admire but only imperfectly comprehend. So long as he is fully engaged in his work, she continues, Alexander functions well, but "he runs the risk of encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli" (Bohlke 6).

In the light of Cather's subsequent comments, this account is interesting for several reasons. First, the novel's theme appears to be in keeping with the implied thematic coherence of her collection of short fiction titled The Troll Garden (1905), expressed by epigrams Cather chose from Christina Rossetti and Charles Kingsley. As Bernice Slote observes, Alexander is something of a vigorous "forest child" inside a corrupting garden, who is in danger of the sort of dissipation and corruption that she had identified through the Kingsley epigram (xxv–xxvi). Second, nothing in Cather's statement indicates the influence of James or Wharton; instead, her commentary suggests a naturalistic approach to her subject. The forces that motivate her title character seem to be biological in nature and invite comparisons with Frank Norris's McTeague, a novel she admiringly reviewed in 1899. As a social type, Alexander is in keeping with a figure Elizabeth Ammons has identified—the engineer as cultural hero. Instead of following the example of Richard Harding Davis or Harold Bell Wright, Ammons suggests, Cather may have been calling this fictional archetype into deep question. Finally, Cather, contrary to her later commentary, presents herself not as an inexperienced novelist or even a first-time novelist but as someone who knew what she was doing and why.

Over the next two decades, Cather gave two other accounts of the creation of Alexander's Bridge. The first served as a preface to a reissue of the novel in 1922, the second as the essay "My First Novels (There Were Two)," published in The Colophon in 1931. In both instances, Cather looks back on the novel with a degree of skepticism. These essays substantially differ from the remarks in the earlier interview and somewhat from one another.

In the preface, Cather characterizes her writing of Alexander's Bridge as a youthful mistake and herself as an "inexperienced writer": "Everything is new to the young writer, and everything seems equally personal" (195). She had not yet come to appreciate the familiar, the life she had lived as opposed to the life she sought out or observed. But the "people and the places of the story interested me intensely at the time when it was written, because they were new to me and were in themselves attractive" (195). Alexander's Bridge was essentially an "external" story written out of the stimulus of the "glitter of the passing show" (196). (Her use of this phrase is interesting because "The Passing Show" was the title of one of the weekly columns she wrote for the Nebraska State Journal and, later, for the Lincoln Courier.) Furthermore, she announces that her literary manner was somewhat imitative. The young writer must necessarily "have his affair with the external material he covets" and "strive to follow the masters he most admires, until he finds he is starving for reality and cannot make this go any longer" (197). In contrast, O Pioneers! drew upon her natural material, and, borrowing from the language of Henri Bergson, she adds that it was written "with the wisdom of intuition as opposed to that of intellect" (197).

Of course, in 1912 Cather was not really an inexperienced writer. She was thirty-seven years old; her first essay had been published in 1891, her first short story the following year. By 1912 she had published a volume of poetry, April Twilights (1903), more than forty short stories, and The Troll Garden. As early as 1905 she had completed a first novel, about which we know little except that it had been rejected by S. S. McClure and that Cather thought it not good enough to rework but too good to throw away (Woodress 182). Cather's characterization of herself probably has less to do with experience, or lack of it, than with a sense of having since come into her artistic maturity.

Similarly, most if not all of the interesting "people and places" that entered into the making of her novel were not necessarily "new" to Cather. As we shall see, most of those scenes derived from earlier visits to Europe: her first to England and the Continent with Isabelle McClung in 1902, a second to Italy in 1908, and another to London and Paris in 1909. Cather never completely outgrew the stimulation she received from her first visit to Europe. As her longtime companion Edith Lewis notes, Cather's visit to Avignon on that first trip left a lasting impression: "She always wanted to write a story about Avignon; it was the subject of her last, unfinished story".

Passages in "My First Novels" provide yet another self-portrait of Cather as an artist. This essay is principally concerned with O Pioneers!, a book Cather reimagines as her first novel because its creation was "spontaneous" (92) and natural to her, and was a "novel of the soil" before that sort of story had become fashionable (93). Alexander's Bridge, by contrast, followed the "most conventional pattern": it was more or less set in London; it dealt with "interesting material," but only superficially and in the manner that painters call a "studio picture" (91); there was a great deal of "arranging" and "inventing" in it, because she had adopted the "conventional editorial point of view" (92); it was also conventional because it had a "hero" and "action" and "clever people" saying clever things. Finally, she suggests that, like most young writers at the time, she followed the literary manner of James and Wharton, "without having their qualifications" (93).

Cather added that shortly after finishing Alexander's Bridge she traveled to the desert Southwest, "a country I really did care about, and among people who were part of the country." The longer she stayed there, the more obvious it became to her how "unnecessary and superficial" Alexander's Bridge really was (92). If this is so, there is no hint of that attitude in her interview for the New York Sun, given after she returned from Arizona. Perhaps more interesting is the suggestion that her natural material was no longer confined to Nebraska; it now extended to New Mexico and Arizona.

The differences among these statements can be attributed to nothing more significant than Cather's presentation of a revised but attractive artistic identity, something any shrewd professional writer is apt to do. The later essays were instances of recollection through the lens of time, and her assessments of Alexander's Bridge were surely affected by her subsequent achievements and artistic growth. They usefully describe a writer finding her way at a critical point, and these very differences provoke questions about the novel itself.

Is Alexander's Bridge a "studio picture" filled with clever conversation? There is something of that, but the novel is by no means saturated with sophisticated banter. Much of the European setting is outdoors, not in the drawing room. More often we are given solitary walks or intimate carriage rides or Alexander and Hilda together in her apartment. Through dramatic presentation and recollection of Alexander's student days, Cather imagines the spectacle that is London or Paris, the city sights and revered public institutions, in preference to witty social scenes.

Does the novel actually reveal the fundamental influences of James and Wharton? While Cather may move her representative American character back and forth across the Atlantic, her novel is not "international" in the Jamesian sense. It does not render the Old World with the confidence derived from long acquaintance, nor does it inspect closely the cultural differences among several characters. Alexander is an American in London, where many admire him for his raw-boned energy and efficiency. But from the first, Professor Lucius Wilson directs the reader's attention to the true interest of Cather's title character: he is the "most tremendous response to stimuli I have ever known" (9); he is a "powerfully equipped nature" and has the "fascination of a scientific discovery" (17).

Cather had joined the staff of McClure's Magazine in 1906, after working as a journalist and as a teacher. Her first important editorial assignment had been to rework Georgine Milmine's manuscript, Mary Baker G. Eddy: Her Life and the History of Christian Science, which ran in fourteen installments in McClure's from 1907 until 1909. The job had required her to spend much time in Boston, verifying Milmine's information, as well as rewriting the manuscript. This experience gave her the background for the Boston setting of Alexander's Bridge as well as many new and stimulating acquaintances, such as Annie Fields and the writer Sarah Orne Jewett.

S. S. McClure liked Cather's work, but Cather found the job tedious and tiring. However, one consequence of her efforts was her appointment as managing editor of the magazine. McClure did not seem much interested in Cather's own artistic ambitions. Cather wrote to Jewett complaining that McClure wanted her to divide her time between writing in the manner of Ida Tarbell (on popular science and social issues) and running the office. Mr. McClure, she added somewhat bitterly, did not think much of her prospects as a writer; he believed she was better suited for the executive duties that continually left her tired and feeling she was missing out on life's more stimulating aspects (19 December 1908). Meantime, she was harried by illness, occupied with travel, and committed to a magazine that, though it had half a million readers, was in financial difficulty. Nevertheless, Cather was deeply involved in the literary culture, both in New York and, when editorial duties took her there, in London.

Cather had traveled to London in 1909, while still recuperating from an operation, and apparently anticipated a trip there in April 1911 and another in the spring of 1912: on 17 November 1911 she wrote to S. S. McClure saying that she would not go abroad if business at the magazine required her to stay in New York. Cather herself seems as anxious as Alexander often is to get back to London, though for different reasons. For Cather this desire was a cultural and geographical matter, whereas Alexander wants to be in London because Hilda and his lost youth seem to be there. Cather moves her title character back and forth across the Atlantic with such frequency that we might wonder whether his emotional dilemma and his eagerness to get back to London are plot devices designed to bring two realms of experience into conjunction. Although Alexander attends meetings, presumably to consult with British engineers about the Moorlock Bridge he is constructing in Quebec, engineering practices and building codes for bridge construction in Quebec were actually entirely a Canadian matter; they would not have required the designer to visit England.

Cather's projected trip to London in April 1911 apparently was canceled (Woodress 211). However, Cather did travel to Boston for a few weeks in May and early June, in part to see Mrs. Annie Fields. Later in June she was in Maine, where she visited Mary Jewett, the sister of Sarah Orne Jewett, who had died two years earlier. By the end of June she was back at her desk in New York. According to Edith Lewis, Cather composed Alexander's Bridge during these few months (May through September) (76). Apparently, the novel had been accepted for publication in McClure's before she left with her friend Isabelle McClung for Cherry Valley, New York, near Schenectady, on September.

In Cherry Valley, Cather may have revised her text for serial publication in McClure's; the novel, under the title Alexander's Masquerade, would appear in three installments in 1912. Presumably, Cather kept at least one other copy of her typescript in order to submit it, or a revision of it, to editor Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, in Boston. Houghton Mifflin records show that the manuscript was received on 21 November 1911 and that Greenslet recommended acceptance to the publishers the next day. His report characterized this work (as he said some reviewers had characterized The Troll Garden) as comparable to Wharton's fiction. He emphasized this point once more at the end of the report.

Greenslet summarized the plot of Alexander's Bridge briefly but pointed out that it is the book's "least important part"; rather, the novel is distinguished by the "excellence of the workmanship, its remarkable perceptiveness, its actuality, and the spiritual sense of life that informs it." These are vague but strongly supportive statements. Greenslet was probably alert to the sensitivities of the publisher, for he noted that the illicit affair was "quite unobjectionably handled." By identifying a "spiritual sense of life" in the book he may have been anticipating some reluctance to accept the manuscript. He also observed that McClure's was scheduled to publish the novel and that S. S. McClure was to write the advertising, so the book would be publicized at no cost to them. Greenslet added that, should it prove desirable, they could no doubt obtain the illustrations used in the magazine at a reasonable cost.

This ardent sponsorship of the book would be necessary, since Greenslet was essentially arguing that Houghton Mifflin take the book not for immediate profit (he estimated the novel might sell at best four thousand copies) but because Cather was a "promising" writer and "in every way a desirable connection for us." Greenslet was right, of course; Houghton Mifflin did eventually profit by the connection. In any case, the book was accepted for publication on 22 November 1911. Cather might have made further revisions between that time and when she signed the contract on 1 December (see the Textual Essay), but she would have had very little time afterward, for the records indicate that the manuscript was ready for the printer by 6 December.

The sources for and influences upon Alexander's Bridge are of several sorts: Cather's personal experiences, especially travels to London and the Continent, which brought her in contact with fascinating people and places; literary influences, including specific texts that might have served as models for her novel, as well as the literary techniques of those artists she had read and admired; and newsworthy events of national interest that played an instrumental role in the development of plot and character, the most notable of which was the collapse of the Quebec Bridge on 29 August 1907. All of these sources and influences can be clarified through reference to the historical or social context of the time, and Cather's intentions can be discerned through certain patterns of allusions.

Of all these possible influences on the composition of the novel, Cather publicly acknowledged only the first—that is, the people and places that so excited her when she traveled to London. The impressions her travels provided her, she confessed in "My First Novels," were ones she "tried to communicate on paper"; they were "genuine," she added, "but they were very shallow" (91). On her trip to London in 1909, largely through her association with McClure's and her acquaintances with the drama critic and writer William Archer and the English publisher William Heinemann, she moved comfortably in established literary circles. Cather met Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and others. She sat in William Butler Yeats's box, along with Lady Gregory, to see Maire O'Neill in the London debut of John Millington Synge's notorious Playboy of the Western World (7 June 1909). No doubt her admittance to this social arena was both pleasing and somewhat dazzling, but apparently none of the luminaries she met served as prototypes for any characters in Alexander's Bridge. Some of her creations—Maurice Mainhall, for example—are probably composite pictures that borrowed features or mannerisms from her English acquaintances. Only one person provided her with a model for an important character in the book, and there is no evidence that Cather actually met her. That person was Maire O'Neill, who played Pegeen Mike in Playboy, and about whom we will have more to say.

Places impressed Cather: Alexander's Bridge may be an external novel in the sense that she imported recollections of different scenes and places into the book and made them serve her artistic purposes. Many of those places appear to have only an incidental relation to the plot. Cather might identify with her created character, because she and Alexander shared a feeling that one's "potentialities" were not being lived out (13); this feeling is clear from her letter to Jewett and elsewhere. Like Alexander, Cather was keenly responsive to certain stimuli. However, those stimuli were qualitatively different—Alexander responds to people and events seen through the lens of lost youth, while Cather, by her own admission, felt exhilarated by a new social environment and the dazzle of the passing show.

Cather drew upon memories of scenes that had for her the vivid brilliance of newness. In much the same way that she combined in "Paul's Case" the recollection of a high school boy she had known in Pittsburgh with her own excited reaction to New York City, she gave to Alexander emotions she had herself experienced. However, for Alexander, Cather located the origins of those feelings not in stimulating and interesting people and places but in his desperate sense of lost youth and ardor. In this sense, Alexander's Bridge could have easily worn the same subtitle she gave to "Paul's Case," for it too is a "study in temperament"; but, as with the short story, the author's temperament, which gives an emotional color to the narrative, ought not be confused with Alexander's psychological condition.

Some parts of Alexander's Bridge seem to have less to do with scene setting than with sightseeing. So far as the formal coherence of the novel or Alexander's emotional turmoil and indecision are concerned, the dialogue and events of these episodes could have happened anywhere. For Cather, however, these places were probably tinged with powerful emotional resonances. We can establish a catalog of the scenes that appear to derive principally from Cather's experience.

In chapter 1, Lucius Wilson's walk to the Alexander house on Brimmer Street retraces familiar territory, for Cather lived on nearby Chestnut Street when working on the Milmine manuscript. During her stay there she met, among others, Mrs. James T. (Annie) Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, and the neighborhood had associations with a rich literary and intellectual environment. She describes some of those feelings in her essay "148 Charles St."

Nearly all of chapter 2 focuses on the Duke of York's Theatre, where Hilda Burgoyne plays Peggy, a donkey girl, in the obviously Irish though fictional play Bog Lights. Like Alexander, Cather was the beneficiary of her acquaintances and sat in Yeats's box at the opening of Synge's Playboy at the Royal Court Theatre, where she saw Maire O'Neill. In the company of drama critic William Archer she saw Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon, a one-act play that concludes with a fugitive singing the popular ballad of that name.

In chapter 3, Alexander walks from his hotel to locate Hilda's lodgings off Bedford Square; a few days later he walks along the Victoria Embankment, crosses the Thames on the Westminster Bridge, and watches the Houses of Parliament aglow with the color of sunset. In her 10 August 1902 travel letter for the Nebraska State Journal, Cather notes that she had found a comfortable hotel "almost under the dome" of St. Paul's Cathedral. "We came here," she wrote, "because we wanted to be within walking distance of the Tower, Old Bailey, and the Temple." She and Isabelle McClung typically began their walking tour of the city in the morning but would soon become diverted: one starts "to make pilgrimages in the orthodox fashion, but one ends by merely watching the procession with perplexity" (World and the Parish 2: 907).

In chapter 4, Hilda and Alexander recall their student days in Paris, including a particular walk to the Place Saint-Michel, and along the Rue Saint-Jacques. And there are vivid images of light, the scent of lilacs, and the tragic face of an old woman. Again, to the degree that it was not entirely invented, this recollection may have come from the 1902 trip; curiously, Cather did not write much about Paris for the Nebraska State Journal, restricting herself to a travel letter about "Two Cemeteries in Paris" (World and the Parish 2: 924–29).

In chapter 5, Cather renders with great detail Alexander's steamship trip to London—the high swells of an oily sea, the smell of damp woolens, the humidity that made his hair collect drops of moisture, and so forth. She divides her attention between descriptive passages of the voyage and an assessment of Alexander's vacillating and troubled state of mind. This scene could have been based on one of her trips abroad or a composite picture of different crossings.

Chapter 7 is given over almost entirely to Alexander and Hilda's carriage ride to Kew and Richmond and back into London. This is one of the most extensive travel-like scenes in the novel, and the reader's attention is divided between the lovers' conversation and a tour through London on a rare day of fine weather. Cather's description of London light here, as William Curtin observes in a footnote (World and the Parish 2: 912n), is reminiscent of a similar description in the travel letter "Kensington Studio." Cather remarked on the changing quality of light as one travels westward from the city along Piccadilly toward Kensington: "From Trafalgar westward the very color of the city changes; the grimy blackness of the smokeladen town grows to a splendid grey about the National Gallery and St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and from there the color runs gradually into a higher and higher key, into the glorious green of the parks and the bold white of the club houses along Piccadilly, and finally into the broad asphalts of Kensington that are covered, or rather dusted, with a yellow sand that catches the sunlight like gold powder" (World and the Parish 2: 912).

Cather might have combined her own recollections with images evoked by a poem by Alfred Noyes. Toward the end of their carriage ride, Alexander observes: "How many street pianos there are about to-night! The fine weather must have thawed them out. We've had five miles of 'Il Trovatore' now. They always make me feel jaunty" (87). The reference to Il Trovatore may have less to do with Verdi's opera by that name than it does with Noyes's popular poem "The Barrel Organ" (1904; see the Explanatory Notes). The weather, the time of year, the sunset light, the bustle and tramp of the crowd, and of course the music of street pianos have their analogues in Noyes's poem. Perhaps more important is the fact that London is characterized as the land of lost love where "dead dreams go." A London laborer, for example, "stares into the sunset where his April love is fled, / For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led / Through the land where the dead dreams go" (Noyes 230). Not only does Alexander ask Hilda to sing for him in chapter 4, but his search, through her love, for his own dream of youth and expectancy is mirrored in this and other passages in the poem.

Other episodes might also have drawn upon Cather's recollections. In chapter 8, for example, Hugh MacConnell walks Hilda home from the theater on a foggy night. And Alexander's train trip to Quebec might have been informed by Cather's own recent (1911) journey to Portland, Maine; she would not have had to go to Canada to see "gray rocks and hills and meadows" (105), smell the "pine-scented air" (109), or view the crystal-clear sky, at any rate. This journey is principally devoted to dramatizing Alexander's unquiet mind and sense of personal indecision, but Alexander does imagine yet another trip to London (145). While glancing out the window to see a group of boys camped along a marsh, he recalls camping "on a sandbar in a Western river" during his youth (105–06). As has often been pointed out, this seems to be a reference both to Cather's story "The Enchanted Bluff " (1909) and to her own childhood in Nebraska (see Explanatory Notes).

The reasons for this summary of episodes that probably derived from Cather's experience are several. First, as already suggested, the author might have imported her own feelings and impressions of people and places into her narrative quite easily. Second, this early in her career, it was an article of faith with Cather that such sharp feelings were necessary for good writing. In a letter to her former student Norman Foerster (10 July 1910), she advised that excellent writing comes from close and engaged acquaintance with the things of this world, for that is what gives it an individual character. And in a letter written in Naples to her former teacher Alice E. D. Goudy (3 May 1908), she says that one ought to read the densely detailed histories of Tacitus and Seutonius in Italy because the details must have a physical reality and tangible character. However, those same impressions of her trips to London, Cather later came to believe, were thin and shallow, or as she put it in her preface, "youthful vanities and gaudy extravagances" (196). Third, one of the reasons why she might have come to deprecate her first novel has to do with the imported character of those impressions. The scenes and episodes instanced above are for the most part attached to the consciousness of Bartley Alexander, but he is too self-absorbed, on the one hand, and too jaded, on the other, to be an adequate register of the sorts of emotions Cather had experienced.

Episodes deriving from Cather's travels and the feelings associated with them constitute nearly a quarter of the book. Cather's own comments in "My First Novels" notwithstanding, a great deal of this novel is not set in the "drawing room," nor does it deal with "smart and clever" people. Alexander and Hilda derive their most vital and engaging qualities from their rural backgrounds, and these same qualities are dramatized most effectively in scenes that reflect Cather's vivid and deeply felt memories in combination with their own passions and desires.

Two principal events influenced the genesis of Cather's novel. The first was the collapse of the Quebec Bridge on 29 August 1907. Ever since John P. Hinz's 1950 essay "The Real Alexander's Bridge," critics have acknowledged that the collapse of Moorlock Bridge was based on an actual bridge disaster and that, at least in certain details, elements of the plot and the behavior of Bartley Alexander were patterned after the consulting engineer, Theodore Cooper. The second event was the emergence of the Irish National Theatre, which promoted a nationalistic aesthetic ideology and achieved a certain notoriety with the production of Synge's Playboy of the Western World, in which the prototype for Hilda Burgoyne appeared in the role of Pegeen Mike. Critics have largely ignored the importance of this influence. The relation of these events to specific passages in or aspects of the novel are dealt with in some detail in the Explanatory Notes. Here we will describe these influences as they bear upon the genesis of Alexander's Bridge.

The construction of the Quebec Bridge was newsworthy even before its collapse; the bridge was an emblem for the progressive era of scientific efficiency. If only symbolically, the catastrophe left progressive prospects in doubt; nearly eighty workers died, and the event triggered an exhaustive Canadian inquiry into the disaster. In 1906, in an article titled "Erection of the Quebec Bridge," Scientific American had hailed the project as a prospective engineering triumph, and Canadian Magazine ran a lengthy article by James Johnstone on the history of "Bridging the St. Lawrence." The undertaking was a matter of national pride for Canadians and Americans alike, for it was to be the longest cantilever bridge in the world and it was, for all intents and purposes, an American feat of engineering. The designers were Americans; the steel members for the bridge were manufactured by the Phoenixville Bridge Company of Pennsylvania; many of the welders, mechanics, and riveters were Americans.

Once complete, the Quebec Bridge would have been an eighteen-hundred-foot steel construction spanning the St. Lawrence River, exceeding in length by some ninety feet the then-longest cantilever, the Forth Bridge in Scotland. The original design for the bridge called for a span of sixteen hundred feet, but Theodore Cooper, the consulting engineer, recommended changing the design after the contract for construction had been drawn up. Thus, cost projections were modified; resulting design changes led to strain on the lower compression members and the bridge's collapse.

Newspaper coverage was extensive and sensational, rivaling the subsequent coverage of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. The journalistic importance of the event is suggested by two front-page headlines printed side by side in the New York Times on 30 August 1907: MARS INHABITED, SAYS PROF. LOWELL" and, in larger bold type, "BRIDGE FALLS DROWNING 80." For the journalist, the Quebec Bridge collapse had all the ingredients of a newsworthy story —considerable loss of life, tragic technological miscalculation, the drama of an urgent telegram to cease work having been fatally delayed, and the fall from public esteem of a celebrated engineer.

Given the widespread publicity about the event, it is curious that only one reviewer of Alexander's Bridge even mentions, and then only in passing, the Quebec Bridge calamity as a source. Surely contemporary readers could not have failed to notice the similarities, but perhaps the connection was so obvious that it did not require explanation. The parallels are so explicit that it seems clear Cather was not attempting to disguise the connection. However, there is no evidence that she was trying to exploit the notoriety of the subject,and she insisted that hers was not an "industrial novel" of the muckraking sort. Although her story followed accurately the events leading up to the bridge collapse, the divergences from fact are the more interesting because they show that Cather adapted the historical event to her own artistic purposes.

Moorlock, like its prototype, was to be the longest cantilever bridge in the world. The cause of the collapse is also identical—too much stress on a lower compression member. The Moorlock Bridge, like the Quebec Bridge, "sank almost in a vertical line, snapping and breaking and tearing as it went" (114; see illustrations 18–21, esp. 21). Cather reduced the number of casualties only slightly. She writes that "by morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out of the river, but there were still twenty missing" (115); the New York Times (30 August 1907) initially reported that eighty men had died, but that estimate was later lowered to seventy-five.

Cather changed the facts in some important ways. Although he was not the bridge's principal designer, Theodore Cooper, the consulting engineer, was the focus of most newspaper and magazine pieces about the disaster. In appearance and manner he was nothing like Bartley Alexander. He was sixty-eight years old at the time of the collapse; he had not been on the site of construction for more than two years prior to the accident; he was somewhat vain and arrogant; and, by his own admission, he was a frail and unhealthy man.Alexander, by contrast, looks "as a tamer of rivers ought to look"—forty-three years old, over six feet tall, and "glowing with strength and cordiality and rugged, blond good looks" (10). He complains that he is being forced by the bridge commission to "build pretty well to the strain limit up there. They've crowded me too much on the cost" (62). Cooper, on the other hand, was at least complicitous in cost-cutting measures, and in fact boasted that the Quebec Bridge would be the "best and cheapest," a future model of bridge construction.

A fatal moment in Cather's plot involves the nondelivery of a telegram sent to Alexander apprising him of worries about the bridge and asking him to come at once. The first telegram does not reach him because he is with Hilda in his New York apartment and unavailable to receive it; a second reaches him the next day, too late to avert the catastrophe. In actuality, Cooper had been advised by Norman McLure (the man he had appointed to keep him informed about the construction project), first by telegram and then in person, that the lower chords of the bridge were shifting. After meeting with McLure on 29 August, Cooper sent a wire to the chief engineer advising them not to add more weight to the bridge until the condition of the compression members could be properly evaluated. Delivery of that telegram was delayed, perhaps obstructed, by a telegraph strike. Cooper at first said he ordered that work on the bridge be stopped immediately; later he modified those remarks, saying that, as consulting engineer, he lacked the authority to stop construction. In any event, apparently he made no plans to visit the site even after the danger became clear.

There are other changes to the facts. First, Cather says Alexander was the "Chief Engineer" (116) for the Moorlock Bridge project, but he was the designer, not an engineer. The chief engineer would be required to work on the construction site. Neither the designer of the Quebec Bridge, Paul Szlapka, nor the consulting engineer, Theodore Cooper, worked on-site.Second, for dramatic purposes, Cather was likely drawn to the notion of the intertwined fates of the creator and the creation, but she altered facts in having her bridge builder die in the St. Lawrence River. Third, Alexander often complains about the pressures from the "commission" to build the bridge cheaply, but there was no such commission. The Quebec Bridge and Railway Company was in charge of the construction and oversight since the very beginning in 1900. From time to time work on the bridge was halted until the Canadian Parliament could appropriate additional funding for construction.

What seems clear is that the Quebec Bridge disaster was fundamental to the story Cather wished to tell from the very beginning. It seems equally clear that, in adjusting the facts of the event to suit her purposes, she meant the reader to be sympathetic to her bridge builder and, because he was to die on the Moorlock Bridge, perhaps even see him as a tragic figure. When Alexander learns of the shifting lower chords of the bridge he acts with concern and dispatch. He is the victim of the collapse rather than its haughty perpetrator. He is largely indifferent to his public reputation and material comfort; in fact, his success has given him the feeling of being "built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap about" (13). He is, in effect, a heroic character living in an unheroic time. Labor organizations, petty profit takers, social and charitable obligations, and, finally, desperate and, we are to assume, lesser men who cling to him in the river bring him down.

Nothing in the story of the Quebec Bridge catastrophe would have suggested several trips to London, however, or the title character's involvement with an Irish actress. Much of that dimension of the narrative came from an entirely different sort of event. Although Cather had seen the London debut of Synge's Playboy of the Western World and a performance of Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon during her 1909 trip, that is all we know about Cather's personal acquaintance with the performances of the Irish National Theatre Company.

The initial purpose of the company, which was established in 1903 but actually had its beginnings, under other names, a few years earlier, was to represent authentic Irish character and culture onstage. The actors and actresses were unpaid amateurs, often performing on makeshift stages and under difficult circumstances throughout the country. Thanks to the philanthropic support of a wealthy Englishwoman, Miss Annie Horniman, the company leased the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Thereafter they were able to perform their plays in more favorable and professional conditions. Among the important members were George Moore, John Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, and William Butler Yeats, but the entire acting company was united in wishing to avoid caricature, to shun the "stage Irishman," and to reclaim in dramatic form authentic Irish speech and folk culture. They also wished to avoid a self-conscious "literary taste," preferring to deal with common and local themes and to address directly the Irish people as the true standard of aesthetic judgment. There was some hope as well that the various community performances would help to unite Ireland and promote national independence. For a time there were divisive sentiments in the company—one group claimed that the dramas should serve largely political purposes, while the other approved of a literary nationalism but thought that artistic excellence was their primary concern. The drama of the Irish National Theatre was regionalist in character and nationalist in outlook at the same time that, in the minds of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and others, it aspired to the highest literary achievement.

When the company first played in London in 1903, a handful of English critics, including drama critic William Archer, praised the performances. After Cather saw The Rising of the Moon with Archer in 1909, they discussed the brief play's curious simplicity and strange appeal. This conversation apparently made a lasting impression on Cather, for she recalled it many years later in a letter to E. K. Brown (24 January 1947). She had been perplexed by the lack of drama in this short play. Archer explained that anything interesting on the stage is perforce dramatically interesting and belongs there. Cather was to recall that she had learned something important that evening. "All at once," writes James Woodress, Archer "had struck out a foolish platitude she had previously respected devotedly" (207).

Archer published an essay in McClure's elaborating his ideas about modern drama only a few months later, "The New Drama and the New Theater" (November 1909). In this relatively brief essay, he traces the dramatic inheritance of the nineteenth century, locating the primary cause for revolutionary change in the person of Henrik Ibsen. It was not merely Ibsen's realism but his "localism" and his "nationalism"—the unembarrassed attachment to a dramatic rendering of the familiar—that made him such an important figure. One of the beneficiaries of Ibsen's revolution was the Irish theater. For Archer, Ibsen's influence could not be underestimated, for it reenergized the drama and in England "meant a declaration of independence from France; just as the progress of American drama, from about 1900, has meant a declaration of independence from both France and England" (10). For Archer, London theatergoers were now forced to look to Dublin or Manchester or even New York for something new and important in the drama. He concludes his essay by recalling his visit to New York in 1907 and discovering this radical change: "[I] saw nothing but plays not only by American authors, but taking firm hold of modern American life, political, social, commercial, domestic, in the East and in the West, in the heart of civilization and on its frontiers" (14).

Her conversations with Archer and her reading of his essay might have had contradictory influences upon Cather. On the one hand, as Loretta Wasserman has argued, Archer was forthrightly urging her to remove to London; on the other hand, if she really took his artistic statements to heart, he was suggesting that to be an artist one must return to one's native materials. Synge had faced the same sort of decision; at Yeats's urging, he had left Paris and returned to Ireland, and he began to write about Irish peasant life in Mayo or on the Aran Isles. The success of Riders to the Sea proved that Yeats was right, but the Irish reaction to Playboy of the Western World proved that he was notoriously right.

When Playboy debuted in Dublin in 1907, many theatergoers were outraged, and the performances occasioned what are typically known as the "Playboy riots." Upset theatergoers objected loudly and sometimes violently to its supposed indecency, its coarse language, and its putative theme (parricide); the play depicted Irish life and character in ways that the more refined, or more insecure, Irishman or Irishwoman found scandalous. When the Irish National Theatre performed in the United States in the fall and winter of 1911–12, Irish Americans reacted similarly to Playboy in several cities, including New York—hooting the players offstage, pelting them with rotten vegetables, and the like.

The London audience was perplexed but not outraged by Synge's play. Whatever she might have thought about the play, Cather found Maire O'Neill, the woman who played Pegeen Mike, particularly interesting. Edith Lewis recalled that Cather thought O'Neill a "gifted young actress . . . whose beauty and engaging personality vividly impressed her" (68). Lewis was perhaps referring to O'Neill's "personality" as a dramatic presence, but it is possible that Cather actually met her. We do not know how much Cather knew about O'Neill's life, though Yeats or Lady Gregory could have given at least an anecdotal biography of her; the ways in which Cather presented the life and background of Hilda may be wholly invention or, as in the case of the Quebec Bridge story, deliberate alteration of the facts to fit her own fictional purposes.

We may note the differences. Hilda Burgoyne comes from an acting family; she is originally from rural Ireland, though she grew up in London; she keeps a "mite of a hut in Galway" (49); she sends money home to her sisters and her cousin Mike; the playwright Hugh MacConnell is in love with her; Alexander remembers her as a combination of the "homely and sensible" and the "utterly wild and daft" (30); she plays the donkey girl Peggy in the play Bog Lights; and Maurice Mainhall says she has "the Irish voice" (24).

Maire O'Neill was actually named Molly Allgood; she changed her name because her sister Sara Allgood was an actress in the same company. However, O'Neill did not come from Galway or from an acting family: her parents were working-class Dubliners. She never studied in Paris, but she became famous in the role of Pegeen Mike in Playboy of the Western World. She was engaged to John Millington Synge, more than twelve years her elder, until his death in early 1909, only a few months before Cather saw her perform in London. Perhaps O'Neill recognized that her dramatic success was largely due to her Irish voice. "In dialect she is the one poetical actress our movement has produced," wrote Yeats (654–55).

These two events—the Quebec Bridge disaster and the dramatic experiments of the Irish National Theatre Company—were important influences upon Cather's novel. The first Cather knew largely through newspaper accounts; the second had more personal associations. The highly publicized bridge collapse helped shape her plot; Abbey Theatre nationalism and her interest in Maire O'Neill also contributed to the book. Together, the events epitomized the seemingly irreconcilable claims of art and life that characterized so much of Cather's fiction prior to the publication of Alexander's Bridge.The oppositions suggested by a successful engineer from the American West and a successful Galway actress were familiar to Cather, but her novel was to deal with this theme far more ambitiously than she had ever attempted before.

Bartley Alexander's problem, or one of his problems, is that he is a public man. Alexander is building the largest cantilever bridge in the world; he is internationally famous; he is the desired guest or speaker at important gatherings. He is, for both Lucius Wilson and Winifred Alexander, the one who is building "bridges into the future, over which the feet of every one of us will go" (18). It seems that Alexander has succeeded mightily. But Cather also portrays a second self, an unlived potentiality that refuses to die. In fact, as Alexander complains, this other self "is fighting for his life at the cost of mine" (130). But Cather never lets the reader know what sort of self or aspiration has been denied in him or to what degree his present life is a diminished thing. We know that Alexander studied at the Ècole des Beaux-Arts, but we do not know what he was studying. Presumably he was studying architecture, but if one wanted to learn how to build bridges it would have been better to go to Scotland than to Paris, and better still to join the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where so many bridge builders, Theodore Cooper included, trained. Alexander is something of an American Everyman, or at least the sort of man the "Sunday Supplement" men wanted for their newspaper articles—a restless, mechanical force, advancing a materialist, capitalist culture he neither understands nor desires.

Hilda Burgoyne is a success story too. She has succeeded largely through the resources of her attractive personality and her charming Irish voice. If Alexander's life has become hollow and false, as McClure's editorial staff apparently wished to emphasize by entitling the novel Alexander's Masquerade, Hilda's success derives from her straightforward authenticity. She is very much the "fairy child" who has entered the garden walls, but her primitive energy has not been enervated by the trolls. "She's really MacConnell's poetic motif, you see," says Maurice Mainhall; she "makes the whole thing a fairy tale" (24). The plot and the feeling of Bog Lights depend on "her lightness of foot, her lightness of touch, upon the shrewdness and deft fancifulness that played alternately, sometimes together, in her mirthful brown eyes" (25).

Without extratextual evidence, there is no way of knowing how, or in what order, Cather fused an engineering disaster and the story of a theater company's controversial triumph into a single narrative. What is more certain is that there is a tissue of oppositions in the book. The opposition of the practical world of bridge building to the artistic world of drama lends considerable weight to Susan Rosowski's observation that Alexander's Bridge is "an allegory about art in which Cather explored relationships among the creative energy of the artist, the spiritual world, and the physical one" (35).

Some of these oppositions are straightforward. The Victoria and Albert embankments in London or the quays in Paris, built to control and tame the Thames and the Seine, are set against the strong St. Lawrence River or a meandering river with its sandy banks that Alexander recalls from his youth. The Elgin Marbles, testifying to the "lastingness of some things," are in the British Museum, but so is the mummy room, that "ultimate repository of mortality" (32) which so terrifies Alexander.

The allusive expression of some of these oppositions is more subtle. Note the songs Cather refers to. In chapter 4, Alexander asks Hilda to sing "The Harp that Once," one of Thomas Moore's songs from Irish Melodies, which were intended to capture the Irish spirit and did in fact win sympathy for Irish nationalists. The song itself is a lament, for the harp "hangs as mute," "As if that soul were fled,— / So sleeps the pride of former days, / So glory's thrill is o'er." It is a song, in other words, of the loss of Irish soul as reflected in the loss of music or art. "The Rising of the Moon," the song that Hilda sings in Bog Lights and which Lady Gregory used in her play by the same name, is not so benign as it might appear, or so poetic as some critics have thought. A celebration of Irish bravery in the rebellion of 1798, it was written several decades later by the nationalist John Keegan Casey while he was in prison. It is a military song, a call to arms and a chant for Irish freedom, whose lyrics include: "Death to every foe and traitor. Onward, strike the marching tune / And hurrah me boys for freedom, it's the rising of the moon" (Gregory n.p.). "The Cloak of Gaul" is playing when Alexander enters the theater to see the final act of Bog Lights. The actual title of the song is "In the Garb of Old Gaul," composed by a major in the Black Watch in 1748. It is also fiercely nationalistic and was often used later as a recruitment song: "No effeminate customs our sinews embrace, / No luxurious tables enervate our race; / Our loud-sounding pipe bears the true martial strain, / So do we the old Scottish valor retain" (Graham 112–13). These songs have nothing to do with bridge building or bridge builders, nor, given the martialism of the lyrics, do they lend a realistic element of Irish charm to the scene. Instead, they reflect Cather's musings on a native and local culture whose folkways and dialect are the stuff of art.

Just as the Irish National Theatre Company tried to do away with the stock Irish character, Cather particularly prided herself on her representation of the Swede in O Pioneers! In "My First Novels" she wrote that her novel was "not only about Nebraska farmers, the farmers were Swedes! At that time, 1912, the Swede had never appeared on the printed page in this country except in broadly humorous sketches; and the humor was based on two peculiarities: his physical strength, and his inability to pronounce the letter 'j'. I had certainly good reason for supposing that the book I had written for myself would remain faithfully with me, and continue to be exclusively my property" (94–95). Cather may have been somewhat disingenuous in that last remark, since William Archer and her own experience had convinced her that a faithful rendering of the local was actually the future of a reinvigorated art.

Since John Hinz's brief essay on the novel in 1950, several literary sources and influences for Alexander's Bridge have been nominated, but we are particularly interested in those influences that may have contributed in some measure to the genesis and composition of the book. This is an appropriate emphasis, because as Bernice Slote, James Woodress, and others have noted, after The Professor's House (1925), Alexander's Bridge is psychologically the most autobiographical of Cather's novels. Generally, these influences are of two sorts: those that contribute to the creation of character and psychological motives, and those that contribute to plot and narrative texture.

Cather herself confessed she was too much under the sway of Wharton and James when she wrote the novel, though her comments indicate the influence of a literary manner, not specific textual sources. Hinz briefly notes the Jamesian qualities in Alexander's Bridge: "The international flavor, the genteel drawing rooms, the Boston-London axis of the story, and above all the painstaking analysis of motive and dissection of character are manifestly Jamesian" (473). Bernice Slote nominates Anthony Bream in James's The Other House as a possible model for Bartley Alexander and notes that Cather reviewed James's novel in 1896, but she also believes that it is wrong to describe the novel as "Jamesian" (xvii; see also viii n. 3). We might also surmise that James's "The Jolly Corner" (1908), with its emphasis on a dreaded and ghostly alter ego, had something to do with Alexander's psychology.

Cather's novel is filled with Whartonian ironies, such as the wet and illegible letter Alexander wrote but never mailed to Winifred announcing his love for Hilda, but which his wife takes as evidence of devotion to her, or his statement to Philip Horton that "Anything I do can be made public" (110). Tonally, Cather's ironies are seldom so wry or comically pungent as Wharton's, but perhaps Wharton's suggestion in The House of Mirth (1905) that Lily Bart is psychologically pursued by the Furies has some parallel in Cather's novel. Both Cather and Wharton were interested in myth, and L. V. Jacks and Bernice Slote believe that the love triangle between Paris (also known as Alexander), his wife, Oenone, and Helen of Troy may have contributed to Cather's conception of the love triangle she was developing in the novel. James Woodress has reaffirmed those correspondences and added that Keats's Endymion might have contributed to the moon imagery that Slote locates in Greek and Roman myth and in Cather's novel (220).

Elizabeth Ammons sees Cather working with a different sort of myth—"the energizing myth of American manhood, nationhood, and empire" (748). She instances an abundance of essays published in Scribner's, Harper's, Century, and, of course, McClure's that celebrated engineers, and often bridge builders, as providing social and cultural background for the novel. To this list she adds the possible influences of Rudyard Kipling's "The Bridge Builders" (1894), Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune (1897), Harold Bell Wright's The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), and the personal and published example of that epitome of masculinity, Theodore Roosevelt. These essays and fictions, according to Ammons, indicate the "well-developed backdrop of literature and cultural mythology" associated with "conquest of the environment, expansion of Anglo hegemony, and veneration of the Wild masculine West" (754). However, according to Ammons, Cather undertook to "demythologize" this myth in much the same way that Viola Roseboro's story "The Mistaken Man" (1907) did. Ammons speculates that Roseboro's story of a bridge disaster provided the "spark" for Cather's novel: the bridge builder in "The Mistaken Man" also works reluctantly but uncomplainingly under cost-cutting pressures; his bridge collapses, taking with it a trainload of Sunday School children.

Marilee Lindemann has identified the influence of Frank Norris's McTeague, though not in regard to the "second self " that bedevils both McTeague and Alexander. And, though they are not literary sources per se, Lindemann argues that Cather may have been influenced in a negative or ambivalent way by the writings of Theodore Roosevelt and Jane Addams. E. K. Brown, while recognizing that Cather tempered the violent emotions found there, suggests that Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde may have served as a source for her protagonist. However, Cather's fiction, both before and after the publication of Alexander's Bridge, is so saturated with the theme of a divided self that this line of inquiry can only generally be related to the process of composition of the novel.

Susan Rosowski has discerned traces of Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallott" in the novel, but she also notes that at points Cather drops her authorial persona and "experiments in the manner of the French symbolists, using language rich in synaesthesia to evoke a private mood in which the present moment hangs suspended" (37). As evidence for this quality she instances two richly descriptive passages, both deriving from Cather's experience in London. This is an especially rich vein of inquiry. Despite their incidental relation to plot or to character development, these passages often give energy and emotional color to the story out of proportion to the events they dramatize. This also helps to explain the patterned allusions that seem to disclose and underwrite an intellectual complex, a tension between the nationalistic art of "localism" of the Irish theater (suggested by passing references to songs whose titles were benign but whose lyrics were militant) and the august embodiment of a universal world culture (hence mention of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum). T. S. Eliot, also influenced by French symbolism, developed an analogous technique at that time.

A final strand of literary influence may offer some clues about Cather's approach to her material. As has often been noted, Cather reviewed Kipling's volume of stories The Day's Work (1898) in the Pittsburgh Leader in February 1899. Of the writer in general, she said, "The world has been a great many centuries in evolving its present gigantic industries, but Mr. Kipling is the first man who has ever written of them seriously or sympathetically" (World and the Parish 2: 557). Kipling, she wrote, "finds energy the most wonderful and terrible and beautiful thing in the universe" and has made energy "the subject matter for art" (558). Included in The Day's Work was the story "The Bridge Builders," about an engineer building a bridge over the Ganges, a man who, in Cather's words, "built his life into the bridge" (558).

Readers of Alexander's Bridge were made to understand, largely through the comments of Cather's Jamesian ficelle, Lucius Wilson, that Alexander, too, had built his life into the Moorlock Bridge:

"I'm sure I did you justice in the matter of ability. Yet I always used to feel that there was a weak spot where someday strain would tell. Even after you began to climb, I stood down in the crowd and watched you with—well not with confidence. The more dazzling the front you presented, the higher your façade rose, the more I expected to see a big crack zigzagging from top to bottom,"—he indicated its course in the air with his forefinger,—"then a crash and clouds of dust." (12–13)

The parallels between material stress (on the lower chord of the Moorlock Bridge) and psychological stress (the foundation of Alexander's being) imply the inevitable collapse of both.

As Merrill Skaggs points out, such locutions as a "crack zigzagging from top to bottom" suggest that Cather borrowed some of her inspiration from Poe, especially from "The Fall of the House of Usher." The passage quoted above, and others scattered throughout the novel, show how Cather meant to connect, symbolically, the fates of creator and creation.

For this reason, Hinz's brief identification of Ibsen's The Master Builder as a literary model is provocative, even beyond the claims Hinz makes for it: "A great builder grows old reluctantly; he becomes infatuated with Hilda—the symbol of his loss; he plans one last triumphant work; he suffers a fall from his own great structure. . . . It is not at all unlikely that she unconsciously drew upon her earlier readings to lend her novel its pattern" (473–74). Hinz adds only that Cather wrote an essay on Ibsen for Hesperian (1 November 1892).

There are other parallels between the two works, however. Halvard Solness, the master builder, has achieved greatly and unexpectedly. He was a poor boy from a rural village who rose to the top of his profession. Because he is largely self-taught he is not called an architect, but he has prospered through his own ambition, through the aid of circumstances and "luck" (what he rather mysteriously calls his supernatural "helpers" in the world).Dogged by a vague fear that he will be dethroned by the younger generation, Solness sometimes thinks he is mad. He believes there is a "troll" inside him that has caused his good fortune but will also turn against him in time. For Hilda, the origin of Solness's problem is that he has a "sickly conscience": "I mean your conscience is feeble—too delicately built, as it were— hasn't strength to take a grip of things—to lift and bear what is heavy" (299). Solness is attracted to Hilda because she is youthful, an emissary from the younger generation he so fears. She is to be his "princess," and his future constructions will be castles in the air with "firm" foundations.It is Hilda who says the master builder "cannot climb as high as he builds" (315); she urges him to climb the tower of a new house he has built for his wife. Solness, claiming he can no longer live without joy, climbs the scaffolding with expectant purpose in his life, but, becoming dizzy, falls to his death.

Ibsen's play provided Cather with an imaginative example of dramatic contrast between two different activities: the building of a bridge and a romantic involvement with a woman perhaps not so coincidentally named Hilda. Furthermore, details in Ibsen's play would have been suggestive to Cather: a builder wrestling with some internal "troll"; a man whose conscience is too weak for the burdens placed upon it; marriage to an elegant woman whose attachments to duty seem stronger than life with her husband; a spontaneous young woman who reanimates the joy within a successful man but drives him to destruction.

Indeed, Cather, through her acquaintance with William Archer, had a more tangible link to Ibsen's dramas than when she wrote her college essay on Ibsen. The only English translation of Ibsen's plays available to Cather was by William Archer and Edmund Gosse. Archer was among the earliest and most prolific of Ibsen's champions, translating Ibsen's complete works and writing many essays and books about the man. If Cather read The Master Builder in the English edition of Ibsen's Collected Works (1906–12), she might have also read Archer's introduction to the play. There she would have learned about the play's genesis and also about the originality of Ibsen's method and subject matter. Archer considered The Master Builder the most autobiographical of Ibsen's works,and one filled with symbolism. But he insisted that it was a mistake to think of the play as purely symbolic. "There is nothing in the play which has no meaning on the natural-psychological plane, and absolutely requires a symbolic interpretation to make it comprehensible," he wrote. "It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes in spite of himself, and sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But the time is surely past when we could reckon hypnotism among 'supernatural' phenomena" (xxxii).

Whether or not Cather got them from Archer, these two critical observations are pertinent to Alexander's Bridge. The St. Lawrence River, the mummy room in the British Museum, the Moorlock Bridge, London—even Hilda and Alexander—exist in their own right, but they also function as symbols in a narrative that Ferris Greenslet, at least, thought was informed by a "spiritual sense of life." Perhaps this is why critics have been able to speak, by turns and in uncontradictory ways, about the novel as realistic, naturalistic, allegorical, or symbolist.

Archer's second point is also germane because, even as a youth, Alexander exerted a powerful mystery and energy. This is true not only for Professor Wilson but also for Alexander's schoolmates; not only for Winifred, who asks Wilson to explain the man by recalling his youth, but also for Hilda; not only for London colleagues but also for the Sunday Supplement journalists. If the audience does not accept Ibsen's investment in Solness of "hypnotic power," says Archer, the originality and spiritual power of The Master Builder will simply disappear. One might say the same about Bartley Alexander. This helps to explain Wilson's final comment in the epilogue: "He left an echo. The ripples go on in all of us. He belonged to the people who make the play, and most of us are only onlookers at the best" (126). Ibsen's drama also helps to explain Wilson's comment about Alexander in the opening chapter. There, Wilson imagines himself an onlooker who, like the spectators at the end of The Master Builder, anxiously watches the protagonist climb ever higher, with a foretaste of catastrophe.

If Cather had read The Master Builder in the 1893 edition, she would have encountered an introduction where Archer made an analogous point. To demonstrate that this hypnotic quality was not at all incredible, he retold the story of Solness but relocated the play in England and made the builder a journalist. Archer would have shown Cather, in a brief way, how translatable Ibsen's story was. If this drama—this "soul history," to use Archer's phrase—could as easily be about a London journalist as a builder in Norway, could it not also be about a Boston engineer?

As Ferris Greenslet noted in his reader's report, S. S. McClure had taken a personal hand in advertising the story in his magazine. In McClure's, Alexander's Masquerade appeared in three installments with five illustrations by F. Graham Cootes; one illustration appeared on the cover of the magazine that contained the first installment. Marilee Lindemann finds this cover illustration "garish" and notes that it curiously pictures a seductive Hilda in the role of Peggy in Bog Lights, thus misrepresenting the subject matter of the novel. All of the illustrations are somewhat romantic, but those in the text do emphasize Alexander instead of Hilda. Lindemann believes the cover painting "tries to place Cather's story within the conventional framework of the adultery novel" (xiv).

The illustration does suggest a certain eroticism (Hilda is barefoot and seductively looking up at the audience), but if McClure superintended the illustrations he might have had something more calculating in mind. To the degree that the painting is reminiscent of Playboy of the Western World, he might have been trying to capitalize on the recent notoriety of Synge's play and the U.S. tour of the Irish National Theatre Company. In the New York Times alone, twenty-three articles appeared between October 1911 and January 1912 on the "Playboy riots" and attendant circumstances. Yeats and Moncure Conway published defenses of the play, and Lady Gregory rather shrewdly and dramatically had Theodore Roosevelt attend the play as her personal guest. Most of the detractors, on the other hand, thought the play was indecent and an offense to Irish morality and character. From the cover illustration, the unsuspecting reader might have anticipated an altogether different sort of story than the one Cather wrote, but it would have generated interest in the story nonetheless.

Greenslet's original suggestion that the publisher might use the illustrations in McClure's was abandoned, except that one was reprinted on the dust jacket above the publisher's description of the novel. In a sense, this publisher's blurb was the first review of the novel. Several of the phrases Greenslet had used in his original reader's report are repeated there. Not only does the description emphasize the resemblance to Wharton's fiction, but it uses such phrases as "dramatic, powerful, and haunting to the memory" and "marked ... by the qualities of distinction, of excellence of workmanship, perceptiveness, actuality, and the spiritual sense of life."

The reviews were generally favorable and tended to repeat the views, and sometimes the same language, that the publisher had advanced in its announcement—that it was an important first novel, reminiscent of Wharton, and that it demonstrated commendable craft and emotional restraint. The reviewer for Living Age wrote, "Willa S. Cather has given the world an exceedingly finished piece of work, and a story which haunts the memory," and observed that, though its theme was intense, the author handled it with "refinement and distinction": "there is no hint of sordidness, and the pathos is never unrestrained" (192). A reviewer for Current Literature detected "great artistic skill" in the book, "brilliant in its reflections of character and life, and admirably restrained and graceful in form and diction" (338).

A writer for the New York Times Book Review characterized the book in much the same way that Cather herself would in "My First Novels": "There are dramatic situations, much clever conversation, and some graphic description. Miss Cather has a faculty . . . of catching and describing in terse, refined phrase the salient features of personality, both mental and physical" (295). An Athenæum reviewer for the British edition of the novel was much more succinct; the novel was "interesting" and the story was told with "some force" (217). Only the reviewer in the Independent was dismissive, saying, "We sometimes doubt whether it is a compliment after all to be likened in literary style to Mrs. Wharton." While there is some feeling in the story, the reviewer thought that, "as a novel, it all seems rather futile" (47).

The review in Current Literature summarized newspaper comments on the novel before offering its own opinion, noting that the Louisville Courier-Journal had called it a "portrait group . . . in which the personages are presented with such intensity, with such feeling for character, as to make the canvas lose a moment its static quality, the figures seem but caught a moment in the scene of a drama" (337). The Providence Journal commented that "only readers as finely sensitive as the author will appreciate it"; and the New York World praised its compact energy and grace and thought it might instruct other novelists in the "power and blessedness of simplicity" (337). The reviewer then observed that the story was loosely based on the Quebec Bridge disaster but praised the author's "individualism and her determination to use social and industrial conditions for her own purposes as an artist" (338).

Only two of the reviews of Alexander's Bridge were signed. Margaret Sherwood, whose novels were also published by Houghton Mifflin, wrote a lengthy review essay for Atlantic Monthly entitled "Some Recent Fiction." The essay begins with a lament that modern fiction is overburdened with complexities. She regrets the loss of the ballad's power and simplicity, and, in a remark prefiguring the most famous phrase in Cather's essay "The Novel Démeublé," writes, "As much by what is left unsaid as by what is said, the imagination is set stirring" (680). Sherwood has relatively little to say about Cather's novel, but what she does say is wholly complimentary: "One finds in Alexander's Bridge a welcome contrast to the over-emotional tales. . . . [T]here is a steady and harmonious development of plot and character, a dignity and reticence in the treatment of the dramatic scenes. The author's workmanship is deft and skillful, and the swift, clean stroke tells on every page" (683).

H. L. Mencken's review is more surly and robust. In the present day, Mencken says, there are two schools of fiction— "The School of Plot and the School of Piffle" (156). But Cather as an artist has the intelligence to "aim higher," and Alexander's Bridge proves to be a "very promising piece of writing" (156). If she has chosen to follow Wharton, there are worse choices she might have made, for Wharton at least is an artist. Mencken commends Cather's style, her dialogue, and her pictures of "the cold Winifred" and the "alluring Hilda." Her treatment of Alexander, too, is good, or at least good enough, but by having him drown at the end Cather evades the problem of the book and sidesteps the realism of the situation. The average man, says Mencken, would have let the situation "drift" and settled into a complacent role as lover of two women separated by an ocean.

It is probably true that the first novel by any writer not content to write formula fiction is, in a way, experimental. Certainly, Cather's diverse materials and literary models indicate her ambition. It is probably true, as well, that looking back upon that first novel, with the full confidence of an achieved mastery of one's craft, Cather felt a twinge of embarrassment about her beginnings. Nevertheless, the novel went through five printings, and she agreed to write a preface for the 1922 reissue of the novel (albeit an apologetic one). Perhaps she liked the novel more than she was willing to admit. Later readers, at any rate, have been kinder to the book than she was. Edith Lewis reread it after Cather's death and was surprised at the intensity of feeling in it. E. K. Brown, Bernice Slote, James Woodress, and others have recognized its limitations but have admired it still. Marilee Lindemann has called it a "minor 'classic"' (vii).

To the extent that the novel represents the unavoidable and tentative first step toward Cather's later works, its significance ought not be undervalued. In her 1922 preface to Alexander's Bridge, Cather herself promoted the belief that a belated obedience to Sarah Orne Jewett's advice prompted her return to the "home pasture" and the creation of O Pioneers!: "Of course, one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get all you can" (vii). Whether or not Jewett pointed the way for Cather's artistic development, what Cather got from the world at large was not merely a congeries of literary techniques and a rather artificial sophistication. Her literary aspirations were high ones. James, Wharton, the symbolists, Ibsen, Synge—these were literary examples of a rare order. And in a sense their examples, as artists, were the same. Henry James truly was a world citizen; he was born in New York, but he claimed his earliest memory was of the Place de Vendôme in Paris. But, by 1904, even James had come home to take stock of his native land, publishing The American Scene in 1907. It was James, too, after reading Wharton's The Valley of Indecision, a novel set in eighteenth-century Italy, who believed Wharton should be "tethered in native pastures" and advised that she take up her "American subject," and "Do New York!" (Edel 580). The result was The House of Mirth. Ibsen and Synge had lived and studied in the cultural capitals of Europe, but they too came home, to Christiania, Norway, or the Aran Isles of Ireland, for imaginative sustenance and a subject matter that truly belonged to them. The lives of the writers Cather deeply admired told the same story. Alexander's Bridge was an ambitious experiment which moved her that much more quickly and securely into her own literary territory, not because she was reacting against that first novel but because it set in motion imaginative energies that would eventually take her there.

This eighth volume of the Cather Edition presents a critical text of Willa Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge, published in April 1912 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. A magazine version of the novel, titled Alexander's Masquerade, was published in three installments in McClure's Magazine in February, March, and April 1912. The first British edition, titled Alexander's Bridges, was published in London by Heinemann in August of the same year. A "new" Houghton Mifflin edition appeared in 1922; this included a preface by Cather. The book was part of volume 3 of the Autograph Edition of Cather's fiction, which appeared in 1937. No other edition in English was published during Cather's lifetime, nor have manuscripts, proofs, or other materials antedating or contemporary with these texts been located.

The editorial procedure of the Cather Edition is guided by the protocols of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions. We begin with a bibliographical survey of the history of the text, sorting out any problems it may present. Making a calendar of extant texts, we collect and examine examples of all texts published during Cather's lifetime, identifying those forms that may be authorial (i.e., that involved or may have involved Cather's participation or intervention). These forms are collated against a base text serving as a standard of collation.The collations provide lists of substantive and accidental variations among these forms.A conflation, constructed from the collations, then provides us with a list of variant readings in all relevant (authoritative) editions. After an analysis of this conflation, we choose a copy-text and prepare a critical text. The collations and their conflation also provide the materials for an emendations list, which identifies changes the editors have made in the setting copy, and for a list of significant variants in authoritative editions that were not included in the list of emendations. In a separate procedure, we make a list of end-hyphenated compounds with their proper resolution.

This essay includes discussions of the composition of Alexander's Bridge and of the production and printing history of the text during Cather's lifetime, an analysis of the changes made in the text during this period, a rationale for the choice of text for this edition, and a statement of the policy under which emendations have been introduced. All page and line references are to the text of the present edition, unless otherwise noted.

Cather apparently wrote most of Alexander's Bridge during 1911; in that year she also had surgery for a mastoid infection, which required several weeks of recuperation; spent approximately a month on McClure's Magazine business in London and another week visiting Mrs. James T. Fields in Boston; and worked again at McClure's for the three months preceding September 28. She then took a six-month leave from the magazine and, with Isabelle McClung, rented a house for three months in Cherry Valley, west of Schenectady, New York. Here she worked on revisions for the magazine text of her novel, which one source reports she had sent to McClure's from St. Louis under the pseudonym "Miss Fanny Cadwallader."

Cather customarily wrote the first drafts of her novels in longhand, then prepared or had prepared one or more typescripts, revising each as she went along.Although no manuscripts or typescripts of Alexander's Bridge are known to have survived, we have every reason to believe that she followed this procedure with her first novel. Presumably, one copy of the final typescript went to McClure's for the magazine edition, and Cather retained another copy, which she revised fairly extensively before sending it (or a retyped copy of it) to Houghton Mifflin. Ferris Greenslet wrote the reader's report, dated 21 November 1911, noting that the manuscript "comes to us as the result of many solicitations" and remarking on the "likeness" of the work to that of Edith Wharton. After summarizing the plot, Greenslet says that the novel is remarkable for "the excellence of the workmanship, its remarkable perceptiveness, its actuality, and the spiritual sense of life that informs it." He expects a modest sale of three or four thousand copies, but adds that Cather will be "in every way a very desirable connection for us." The contract, dated 1 December 1911, provided for a 10 percent royalty on the first 3,000 copies sold at trade-list retail, escalating to 15 percent on copies sold above 5,000.

The McClure's Magazine installments are of roughly equal length, the last one only slightly shorter than the first two. Part 1 in the magazine (pp. 384–95) includes chapters 1–3 of the novel; part 2 (pp. 523–36) includes chapters 4–7; part 3 (pp. 659–68) includes chapters 8–10 and the Epilogue. Illustrations by F. Graham Cootes appear on pp. 384, 524–25, 527, and 658. They are full-page except for the one on pp. 524–25, which is double-page. Quotations (in caps) key them to the text as follows:

384: "Alexander switched on the lights and stood in the archway, glowing with strength and cordiality" (10.5–7, altered). The illustration shows a distinctly fortyish Alexander in an arched doorway, his tall wife to his left, both looking at Lucius Wilson, who appears to be rising from his chair. A bowl of roses on a table occupies the foreground. (Used on p. 11 of the first British edition.)

524–25: "Bartley looked at Hilda across the yellow light of the candles and broke into a low, happy laugh. 'How jolly it was being young, Hilda! Do you remember that first walk we took together in Paris?"' (52.8–11). The center of the table divides the composition: Bartley on the right, looking at Hilda animatedly; Hilda on the left, looking away from him with a much more serious expression. (Used on p. 73 of the first British edition.)

527: " 'Are you going to let me love you a little, Bartley?"' (56.18–19). This illustration accurately depicts the scene described in the text. (Used as the frontispiece to the first British edition.)

658: " 'I thought I had to see you. That's all. Good-night; I'm going now.' She turned and her hand closed on the doorknob" (97.7–9, slightly altered). The illustration shows Hilda, hand on the knob of the door, looking sad; Alexander has her arm, as if about to stop her. The effects of the wet weather, prominent in the text, are not depicted. (Used on p. 139 of the first British edition.)

The first edition of Alexander's Bridge in book form was published on 20 April 1912.Crane reports that a preliminary dummy was ordered on 19 December 1911, that the composition order was placed at the Riverside Press on 28 December, and that printing was authorized 3 January 1912. Complete proof was sent to Cather on 30 January 1912, and two copies of the finished book were sent to secure British copyright on 25 March (23). This information is confirmed by Houghton Mifflin estimate cards and production records.

Crane records two issues of the first edition. In what she calls the "first issue," the half title appears on p. i, p. ii is blank, the title page is p. iii, and the copyright notice appears on p. iv. In the "second issue," the title page is p. i, copyright information appears on p. ii, the half title is on p. iii, and p. iv is blank. Crane argues that, although the rearrangement of the preliminaries "may have occurred in the second pressrun from the standing plates," the rarity of copies of the first issue "indicates that the change was made earlier in the first run, probably a stop-press correction" (23).Crane seems to conclude that what she calls the first issue precedes the second because the Library of Congress deposit copy has the normal arrangement of preliminaries and would presumably have been an early copy, and because there are many more extant copies of the book with the abnormal arrangement of preliminaries than with the normal one.

However, it is difficult to understand why a printer would have ordered a stop-press correction involving the reimposition of plates for no other reason than to change the usual arrangement of preliminaries to an anomalous one—the half title, by convention, precedes the title. Frederick B. Adams suggests that the change might have been made for "esthetic" reasons, in order to have a blank page facing the first page of text (103–04). Adams had previously stated, basing his argument on the Library of Congress deposit copy and on the paucity of copies of the book with the normal arrangement of preliminaries, "that the correct order of preliminaries represents a true first issue, and that the incorrect order is characteristic of all later issues," adding that he could not say "by what freak of production so extraordinary a situation could exist" (99).

We think it equally possible that Crane's "first issue" was the second (showing the half title in its customary position preceding the title) and that what she calls the "second issue" was the first (showing the half title following the title). As Herbert Johnson notes, it was not uncommon for an imposition error to persist through most of the copies printed, and advance copies (and presumably copyright copies) were always made up of the corrected sheets.We also believe it more accurate to label Crane's two "issues" as states of a single issue.In what follows we adopt that terminology.

Crane states that the book was "reissued by Houghton Mifflin in about 1918 using surplus sheets of the original printing," priority of issue determinable only by differences in binding (22). However, the production record card does not mention a reissue in 1918. If no changes were made to the signatures used, it is at least possible that no entry was made (though one would expect to see an entry to cover binding costs, and there is none), but we can find no other evidence of a printing or issue c. 1918. At one point Crane states that "270 sets of the original sheets" were offered to Heinemann, which eventually decided to reset the text for the British edition (23). This cannot have been a c. 1918 reissue, however, because there would have been no reason to offer Heinemann copies of the U.S. edition after Heinemann had published its own (in 1912), unless one makes the unlikely assumption that the original British edition had been exhausted and Heinemann did not wish to reprint from its own plates. More likely, the new issue was the "small edition" (i.e., printing or issue) "which will tide us over for a few months" referred to by Ferris Greenslet, Cather's editor at Houghton Mifflin, in his 4 May 1922 letter to her. It had been printed, he said, while he was in Europe, which would date it between 23 January and 21 April 1922. The Houghton Mifflin production card has an entry "X/4" dated 1/22, involving 270 copies at $.215 per copy. "X" usually indicates a "correction" or "repair" order, and changes involving new plates were made in the copies mentioned below. The most likely assumption is that Houghton Mifflin made changes to the plates and either reprinted 270 copies or altered, bound, and reissued 270 previously unbound sets of sheets of the first issue. The charge of $58.13 (c. 270 x $.215) was for those changes and possibly for binding.We think it more likely that this was a new printing, and treat it as such.

We have seen two copies, and have a description of another copy, of the book without date on title page, with conventionally arranged preliminaries, with colophon but without advertising leaves, and with "low" corrected to "blow" at 55.10. A two-leaf fold is inserted in the last gathering, leading to a new collational formula. These copies are bound in blue mesh cloth with gilt stamping and lack the "S." in Cather's name on cover and spine. We believe they are copies of the January 1922 printing.

Crane says that, in all, the first edition comprised 5,270 copies, that the first impression was of 2,270 sheets (22, 23), and that there was a second printing of 3,000 sets of sheets (23). Crane might have based the 5,270 figure on information provided her by Linda J. Rush, of Houghton Mifflin's contracts department, in a letter dated 31 March 1977, which specifies "a total printing of 5,270 copies." However, this number, as Herbert Johnson points out, is merely the sum of copies entered on the production record card, and clearly refers to all copies of the book printed between 1912 and 1933. In a letter dated 1 May 2001, Ms. Jane LeCompte, corporate communications manager for Houghton Mifflin, reports from printing records "that the first printing was 2500 copies in March 1912," that "a new edition of 1000 copies was printed in 1922; 500 more were printed in 1925," and that "there was a re-issue, with a printing of 1000, in 1933." Crane gives no date for the "second printing" she lists; its size agrees with the figure obtained by subtracting 2,270 from the 5,270 figure she gives for the size of the first edition. We conclude that there was no second printing of 3,000 copies from standing type.

What Houghton Mifflin called a second edition of Alexander's Bridge was initiated in 1921. Greenslet wrote Cather on 27 October of that year: "I think that conditions are coming to a point where we can afford to reprint, but reprinting ought to be accompanied by some sort of reannouncement to restimulate interest in it." He suggested appending a long, uncollected short story, a proposal that came to nothing. He wrote again, on 21 April 1922, that the "reissue" was tentatively scheduled for the fall list and asked Cather if she would like to write a preface. She agreed, and sent the typescript to him in September; he acknowledged receiving it on 25 September. On 30 October Greenslet wrote to say that he was sending Cather two copies under separate cover; she wrote him on 11 November that she still had not received them. The date of publication entered on the Houghton Mifflin record card is 25 October 1922, and the "New ed." is listed in the "Index to Fall Announcements" in Publishers' Weekly for 23 September 1922: 1020. Crane's date of January 1922 for publication is a slip (the preface itself is dated September 1922); the January printing was presumably the second printing of 270 sets of sheets discussed above. The "new edition" had three printings: 1,000 copies on 25 October 1922, 500 in July 1925, and 1,000 in June 1933 (a Houghton Mifflin production record specifies the 1933 printing as consisting of 1,000 copies and dates it 21 June 1933). The list of Cather titles in the preliminaries of the 1922 printing ends with One of Ours (September 1922), in the 1925 printing with A Lost Lady (1923), and in the 1933 printing with Obscure Destinies (1932).

Crane says that the text of the 1922 "edition" is "set from the original 1912 plates to which is added the new front matter" (25) and notes that the error at 55.10 ("low" for "blow") is corrected. If this text was indeed reset from a copy of the first edition or from the plates of the first edition, the 1922 edition is a true edition. If, however, the 1922 printing was made from the 1912 plates with a preface added, it is bibliographically another printing of the first edition; the addition of new preliminary materials does not in itself constitute a new edition, since it does not affect the text of the novel. Careful examination of several copies confirms that the 1922 "edition" text was printed from plates of the 1912 edition, not reset; following a common practice, Houghton Mifflin called the edition a "new" one because it added Cather's preface (it also changed the front matter and omitted the four pages of advertisements at the end already deleted in the 1922 printing) and because a new copyright was secured.Copies of "new edition" printings 2 and 3 bear no date on the title page but have "1912 and 1922" on the copyright page. As noted above, they may be distinguished by the contents of the list of Cather novels included in the preliminary materials.

Alexander's Bridge formed part of volume 3 of the Autograph Edition of Cather's fiction, published in 1937. Scribner's had initiated the idea of a subscription edition as early as 1932, but Houghton Mifflin would not release the rights to the four early novels it had published (Lewis 180–81; Greenslet to Cather, 1 July 1933; Knopf memoirs). When Houghton Mifflin took up the idea, Cather worked with Greenslet, her former editor there, and after some negotiation the edition was agreed to.Cather wanted W. A. Dwiggins, who had designed some of her Knopf novels, as the designer, and she wanted the same type font that had been used in the Thistle Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson (Cather to Greenslet, 18 December 1936). Greenslet demurred (21 December 1936), and Bruce Rogers was engaged instead (Woodress 468). During 1936 Cather looked over the titles to be included and made changes, the number varying with the particular title. There are also blanket changes in the edition, due either to Cather's intervention or, more likely, to Houghton Mifflin house style or Rogers's design—changes Cather probably did not specify but to some of which she may have assented.

In summary, we suggest a simplification of Crane's account, with distinguishing points: HM1.i, a/b. First edition, first printing, 2,500 copies. Date 1912 on title page. Formula: [1–11]8 [12]4= 92 leaves. In one state, the title appears before the half title; in the other state, the half title appears before the title. HM1.ii. First edition, second printing, 270 copies. January 1922. No date on title page. Typo at HM 55.10 corrected. Format [1–10]8[11]10 [ 8+2, quired]= 90 leaves. HM1.iii. First edition, third printing, 1,000 copies. October 1922, with preface. "New edition," first printing. Date 1922 on title page. Formula: [1–11]8[12]6= 94 leaves. List of Cather novels on p. ii ends with One of Ours. HM1.iv. First edition, fourth printing, 500 copies. July 1925. "New edition," second printing. List of Cather novels on p. ii ends with A Lost Lady. Formula as for HM1.iii above. HM.v. First edition, fifth printing. June 1933. "New edition," third printing. List of Cather novels on p. ii ends with Obscure Destinies. Formula as for HM.iii above. HM2. Autograph Edition, vol. 3 (1937).

Houghton Mifflin published the first book edition of Alexander's Bridge as soon as the third installment appeared in McClure's, yet there are more than four hundred variants between the two texts, over 40 percent of them substantive. We believe that these substantive changes are authorial; they are not the sort of variants that results from an editor's hand, and they are typical of the kind of changes that Cather was to make over and over again in later novels. The variants usually affect a word or a phrase. When they involve a sentence or two, the typical change rearranges clauses or phrases, or adds to or deletes from the original version without recasting whole paragraphs. Cather does not reorganize her material or alter her conceptions of character or event; instead, she makes her diction more colorful or precise, eliminates the unnecessary or the redundant, clarifies pronoun reference, and improves the rhythm of a phrase or a sentence. Changes deleting material in the McClure's text outnumber more than two to one changes amplifying such material. A substantial part of the Houghton Mifflin text is set line for line with the magazine text.

The following tables illustrate the different levels of substantive revision made for the Houghton Mifflin text. The reading of the magazine text is given first.