But against the fear and the anxiety, the drive was gathering. Slowly, there accumulated in her the compulsion to write out of the experience of her inner life. To discover for herself what it was she knew about human beings, really knew, and to spend her life exploring that territory. What would her true subject be? What would make the words come alive under her pen? What did she know on the surface of things, and what did she know down to the bone? To think about what she felt: that would be her life's work.

In 1912 she left McClure's for good (she had tried a number of times before but could not manage it), settled into an apartment on Bank Street with her friend Edith Lewis (a copyeditor at the magazine), and began to live the remarkably quiet life that produced an unbroken flow of novels, stories, and essays over the next thirty years. Greenwich Village in the twenties and thirties was exploding with Freud, Marx, and Emma Goldman, but for Cather it was all happening at a great distance. In the country of her life these were border disturbances. By 1918 she had written O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. From the beginning, her books brought recognition and money. She spent the winter in New York, the summer in Nebraska and New Mexico. In the fall or spring she often went to New Hampshire. A number of times she traveled to Europe. Music remained a passion, and many of her friends were musical. She grew handsome as she grew older but, essentially, remained the large smiling plain-faced woman she had always been, wearing schoolgirl middy blouses into her fifties, unfashionable and immature until it was safe, in her famous sixties, to put on the beautiful silk dresses she did know how to wear.