Not that the magazine demands were wrong. But they were definite. I had a delightful sense of freedom when I'd saved up enough to take a house in Cherry Valley, New York, and could begin work on my first novel, 'Alexander's Bridge'. In 'Alexander's Bridge' I was still more preoccupied with trying to write well than with anything else. It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
People grow in honesty as they grow in anything else.
A painter or writer must learn to distinguish what is his own from that which he admires. This was what my friend Sarah Orne Jewett had advised me to do. In taking for a title the name of one Walt Whitman's poems, the author drew attention to his influence upon the mood of her narrative. Critics took widely divergent attitudes toward the book. Randolph Bourne found it a digression into a field for which Miss Cather was not really fitted, either by her style, or her enthusiasm.