Tracy Carr
Library Services Director
Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.
Week One: The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
The desire to make a work of art and the making of it—which is love accomplished without help or need of help from another, and not without tragic cost—is what is deepest and realest, so I believe, in what she has written of human beings. Willa Cather used her own terms; and she left nothing out. What other honorable way is there for an artist to have her say?
If you’ve read one of Willa Cather’s more popular works, My Ántonia or O Pioneers!, there is a thing that pops into your head when you hear her name: the prairie. Long descriptions of the wind rippling across the grains of wheat or grass, fertile ground, farming—that is Willa Cather to many of us. However, The Professor’s House, chosen as our first title in the Read with Welty reading challenge, doesn’t take place on the prairie at all: it’s a part academic novel, part adventure novel, and part domestic novel.
The Professor’s House is the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter and his quiet, midlife, Midwestern, domestic, existential crisis. St. Peter is a history professor who has just won a big academic award, allowing his family to move into a bigger house. But he’s very comfortable in the old house, where he’s written all his books in the attic office, as well as where he and his wife have raised their daughters, and he decides…well, he’d really rather stay. This tiny rebellion allows him to truly steep in his own introspection, and he spends months with his life flashing before his eyes as he reviews his life’s choices and decisions.
I get it. This does not sound exciting. But wait! One of St. Peter’s students, the brilliant and mysterious Tom Outland, plays a huge role in St. Peter’s life. Tom’s backstory, which takes us to the gorgeous mesas of New Mexico, is exciting and adventurous where St. Peter’s life is stable and predictable. The middle section of the book, told to St. Peter by Outland years before about how he discovered an untouched Native American ruin, contrasts with the quiet drama of St. Peter’s chosen life.
We chose The Professor’s House over one of Cather’s better known works for a couple of reasons: we couldn’t resist that The Professor’s House was found in the Welty House (and that there’s a Willa Cather house as well!). We also thought that this quiet novel of a person reviewing their life might resonate with readers in this particularly strange year, where many of us were at home this spring and summer, potentially reviewing our own lives and decisions.
If you’ve read The Professor’s House or decide to read it now, please tell us what you think!
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