"In these days when the 'situation' is made to count for so much in writing.”
Many years ago scholar Tom Quirk showed how F. Scott Fitzgerald while writing The Great Gatsby (1925) was influenced by/and or plagiarized Willa Cather's writing. Fitzgerald himself had to admit it at the success of his novel. In particular, that he had been so deeply affected by what she was tapping into I believe that he also wanted to know and present that feminine ardor of presence Willa was able to emanate off the page. Quirk wrote, "Willa Cather had written Fitzgerald of her admiration of Gatsby in the spring of 1925; the next fall she would begin to write what she ultimately considered her finest novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)." On 28 April 1925--now 99 1/2...