Before she wrote her prose masterpieces, Willa Cather produced striking poems, which were collected in 1903 in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers! by nine years. In her introduction, distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this early edition of April Twilights restores what had been "an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist."

Among the thirty-seven selections are the much-anthologized "Grandmither, Think Not I Forget," and the highly evocative "Prairie Dawn."

Willa Cather (1873–1947) was born in Virginia, moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883, and eventually settled in Red Cloud. After graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1895, Cather returned to Red Cloud briefly before moving east to work on Home Monthly and eventually McClure’s. Her first published books were the poetry collection April Twilights and the short story collection The Troll Garden. In 1923 Cather received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours.



Bernice Slote (1913–83), a distinguished Cather scholar, was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her publications include April Twilights (1903) (1962, 1968); The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893–1896 (1967); and Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Uncollected Short Fiction (1973, 1986), all published by the University of Nebraska Press.