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=== 1930s ===
By the 1930s, an increasingly large share of critics began to dismiss her as overly romantic and nostalgic, unable to grapple with contemporary issues:<ref>{{cite book |last1=Clere |first1=Sarah E. |title=Troubling Bodies in the Fiction of Willa Cather |date=2011 |publisher=University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |page=5}}</ref> [[Granville Hicks]], for instance, charged Cather with escaping into an idealized past to avoid confronting
Cather's lifelong conservative politics,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Frus |first1=Phyllis |last2=Corkin |first2=Stanley |title=Cather Criticism and the American Canon |journal=College English |year=1997 |volume=59 |issue=2 |pages=206–217 |doi=10.2307/378552 |jstor=378552 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/378552 |issn=0010-0994}}</ref>{{efn-ua|Not all critics see her 1930s political views as conservative; Reynolds argues that while she was reactionary later in life, she subscribed to a form of rural populism and progressivism, built on the continuity of community,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Reynolds |first1=Guy |title=The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather |date=2006 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-139-00086-4 |pages=19–34 |chapter=Willa Cather as progressive}}</ref> and Clasen views her as a progressive.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Clasen |first1=Kelly |title=Feminists of the Middle Border: Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and the Female Land Ethic |journal=CEA Critic |year=2013 |volume=75 |issue=2 |pages=93–108 |jstor=44378769 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44378769 |issn=0007-8069}}</ref> Similarly, it has been suggested she was distinctly opaque, and that in terms of literary innovation, she was solidly progressive, even radical.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Arnold |first1=Marilyn |title=Willa Cather's Artistic "Radicalism" |journal=CEA Critic |year=1989 |volume=51 |issue=4 |pages=2–10 |jstor=44377562 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44377562 |issn=0007-8069}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Goldberg |first1=Jonathan |title=Photographic Relations: Laura Gilpin, Willa Cather |journal=American Literature |year=1998 |volume=70 |issue=1 |pages=63–95 |doi=10.2307/2902456 |jstor=2902456 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902456 |issn=0002-9831}}</ref>}} appealing to critics such as Mencken, [[Randolph Bourne]], and [[Carl Van Doren]], soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and [[Edmund Wilson]].<ref>{{cite journal|last=Decker|first=James M.|title=Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism|journal=Modern Language Review|date=April 2003|doi=10.2307/3737843|jstor=3737843}}</ref><ref name="affect">{{cite journal |last1=Nealon |first1=Christopher |title=Affect-Genealogy: Feeling and Affiliation in Willa Cather |journal=American Literature |year=1997 |volume=69 |issue=1 |pages=5–37 |doi=10.2307/2928167 |jstor=2928167 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928167 |issn=0002-9831}}</ref> Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well; in 1931 ''[[Shadows on the Rock]]'' was the most widely read novel in the United States, and ''[[Lucy Gayheart]]'' became a bestseller in 1935.<ref name=Ahearn />
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