Decades before the term throwaway society came into vogue, Willa Cather was concerned that progress and technology were eroding society's appreciation of art. In a speech at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, on May 13, 1925, she warned:
The novel has resolved into a human convenience to be bought and thrown away at the end of a journey. The cinema has had an almost devastating effect on the theater. Playwriting goes on about as well as usual, but the cheap and easy substitutes for art are the enemies of art.
She went on to relate a story of how she had tried to find Longfellow's Golden Legend at a bookstore in Portland that day. The bookstore didn't have it, and the manager told her he wouldn't sell it even if he had it. "He said he was cutting out all his two dollar books," Cather told her audience, "because people wanted Zane Grey and such."
One of Cather's complaints was that people who knew they had no talent for painting or music believed that they could sit down and write a novel, a good novel — if they chose to take the time. In other words, most people think that it doesn't take talent to write a novel.
A true artist, Cather says, should stretch the limits of his or her creativity, in order to strive for something new, rather than something that has been done many times before. In her essay, "On the Art of Fiction," Cather writes:
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
