One of the many charming anecdotes in Benjamin Taylor’s new life of Willa Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas, takes place at the Williams College chapel in the 1940s, toward the end of Cather’s life. As the now world-famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist admired a stained-glass window, an undergraduate shyly approached to ask if she wasn’t Willa Cather. “He asked if I were not I in such a nice way that I admitted it,” she later wrote one of her nieces.

It’s not the reception most intruders upon Cather’s fiercely guarded privacy could expect. An earlier anecdote, a kind of bookend to this scene, occurs in 1919, at the beginning of her ascent, after she had published her beloved “Prairie Trilogy”: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). An importunate New York Sun reporter knocks on her kitchen door while she is washing dishes, to demand to speak to “Miss Cather the Author…on very important business.” She tells him that Miss Cather has gone to Atlantic City “for a rest.” Another would-be biographer is bluntly told to cease contact: “This is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she writes, before claiming she will soon be departing for Mexico City—a place, Taylor notes, she never visited.

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For all of Cather’s