"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. "--BOOK JACKET.