O, Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1923), Cather's immigrant novels, are all set in the rural and small-town American Midwest. These novels pit the recent immigrant — often Scandinavian, sometimes Central European — against the flat, stark land, with its droughts and wind storms and blizzards, and the unremitting hardships they brought in their wake. She also captured the land's stark enchantment. No one wrote landscape as beautifully as she. 

Virginia Woolf said Cather "had all the accomplishments of culture without a trace of its excess." After an early career in journalism, she turned herself into an artist; after an early life in smalltown America, she turned herself into a cosmopolitan. She knew the important questions, posing them in compelling plots with vivid characters, assuming the intelligence on the part of her readers to work out the answers for themselves. 

In The Professor's House (1925), Professor St Peter tells his class that "science" [...] has  given us  a    lot of ingenious toys, they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction." He goes on to instruct that humankind, in losing religion, has given up the great drama of salvation, in which "the king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations," and found nothing to replace it. 

Cather was deep, she could also be dark, but in the end, light shines through her best fiction. Like all the greatest novelists, she was androgynous, or supra-sexual, in her powers of creation: her writing is full of  brilliantly drawn men and women. She could also turn that most difficult of fictional tricks, making goodness believable, and her work  abounds with goodness up against great odds, sometimes winning through, sometimes being crushed by the forces of nature or of human viciousness. 

Willa Cather, my most underrated writer, admired Gustave Flaubert, my most overrated writer. This is revealed in her essay, "A Chance Meeting", about encountering Flaubert's then aged niece in Aix-les-Bains. Her meetings with this widowed woman recall to her "the time in one's life when one first began to sense the things which Flaubert stood for, to admire (almost against one's will) that peculiar integrity of language and vision, that coldness which, in him, is somehow noble." Willa Cather, of all people, turns out to be of the Cult of Flaubert. Most inconvenient, but only, I suppose, for me.