num_pages: 176
description: This collection of Willa Cather stories—her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career—is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes—all are amply represented here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtlety by a writer gathering her formidable powers. With the psychological precision of her early master Henry James and the practical wisdom and wit of her contemporary Edith Wharton, Cather shows us innocents seduced, sophisticates undone, marriages sundered, idealism compromised, and the rare soul uplifted by art.  
language: English
title: The Troll Garden: Short Stories
titlecomplete: The Troll Garden: Short Stories
characters: Flavia Hamilton, Martin Merrick, Jim Laird, Monsieur Emile Roux, Annie Merrick, Imogen Willard, Everett Hilgarde, Lady Mary Percy, Henry Steavens, Arthur Hamilton, Katharine Gaylord, Howard Noble, Adriance Hilgarde, Raymond d'Esquerré, Georgiana Carpenter, Sir Hugh Treffinger, Charley Gaylord, MacMaster, Jemima Broadwood, Harvey Merrick, Clark, Caroline Noble
genres: Literature, American, Classics, Literary Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories
ratings_count: 351
places: Kansas, London, England, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Tarrytown, New York, New York City, New York, New York (State), Long Island, New York, Wyoming, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Boston, Massachusetts
publisher: University of Nebraska Press