THE NAMESAKE by WILLA CATHER
1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
Jon Hagadorn
4.5 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2023
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
THE NAMESAKE by WILLA CATHER
The Namesake tells the framed story of Lyon Hartwell, an American sculptor living in Paris, who explains to a group of young American art students how a return to his family's Pennsylvania home rekindled his sense of national belonging and shaped a major work, "The Color Sergeant." The narrative moves from Hartwell's orphaned childhood and artistic training in Rome and Paris to a poignant visit to his father's birthplace in the United States, where discovering his uncle's grave and a trunk bearing his name awakens a deep kinship with his American rootschoices.
What inspired Willa Cather to write the story
Cather drew on a family legend about a maternal uncle who died in the Civil War and on her own experience of travel and residence in France and Pittsburgh. She had earlier written a poem called "The Namesake" dedicated to a soldier-uncle; in the 1907 short story she reworked that material, shifting details (including the uncle's wartime allegiance) and placing an American expatriate artist at the center to examine how returning home can supply moral and imaginative fuel. Scholars note that Cather's personal name-story and her summers in France and years in Pittsburgh helped shape the tale.
Transcript
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| 0:50.9 | Capital at risk internet banking customers only account fees and charges apply. Oh, Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales. This is your |
| 1:30.6 | host John Haggadhorn. Today a great story from Willicather, called The Namesake. |
| 1:37.0 | The Namesake was published in McClure's magazine in 1907. |
| 1:42.0 | She wrote, |
| 1:43.0 | For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, |
| 1:47.0 | and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. |
| 1:51.0 | It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted. had Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell's studio on the boulevard St. Michael. |
| 2:08.0 | We were all fellow countrymen, one from New Hampshire, one from Colorado, another from Nevada, several from the farmlands of the middle west, and I myself from California. |
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