Middlebrow Readers and Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand, and the Popular Fiction Market

Abstract

In 1918, Houghton Mifflin published My Ántonia, Willa Cather’s fourth novel and her second to make an immigrant woman from the Nebraska prairies its heroine. A decade later, in 1928, D. Appleton & Co. published Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand, another novel of the pioneer era in Nebraska with a female heroine, this one a native-born child of Protestant Irish immigrants. Both novels have been in print continuously since. Initial sales of My Ántonia were modest, reflecting the small size of the first edition. Houghton Mifflin paid Cather royalties on sales of 3,261 copies in October 1918, a month after the novel’s initial publication.¹ In the first few years after 1918, annual sales hovered at just over 1,000, but then they gradually began to climb to 2,000 and above, causing the editor, Ferris Greenslet, to remark with satisfaction in 1921, “‘MY ANTONIA’ seems to be settling into a very long stride.” Promoted more aggressively by its publisher in a literary market much expanded in a decade, Lantern’s initial sales far exceeded those of Cather’s novel—9,000 two months after publication, 16,000 within four months (Williams, Letters to BSA). Sales continued to increase, so that by the early 1930s, Lantern enjoyed the unusual distinction of first appearing on bestseller lists several years after its initial publication (Peterson, Bess Streeter Aldrich 88).

Thanks to the staff of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Love Library and of the Nebraska State Historical Society. Thanks as well to the following scholars for their help and advice and for sharing resources: Jaime Harker, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, Mark Madigan, and Vicki Martin.