Happy 2015, everyone. Let’s get right down to business, shall we?
From a review of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather:
Despite, or rather because of, her own commitment to the craft of writing, Cather thought it was “sheer nonsense to teach ‘Creative Writing’ in colleges,” especially since colleges seemed to be failing in the more fundamental task of teaching their students “to write passably clear and correct English”—perhaps because the professors themselves could not “write passably clear and correct English.”
Not a lot has changed, obviously.
Forget about academic writing. For some truly beautiful prose, check out Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia.