Free Summarizer
Daily · Classics

The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories

Willa Cather · short story collection, 1905·6 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version6 hrs → 50 sec
  • A Norwegian homesteader carves the Dance of Death into his windowsills. Canute Canuteson lives alone on Rattlesnake Creek and cuts men praying with skulls over their heads, demons mocking them, serpents coiled through every painted vine. The narrator calls it a Dance of Death by one who had felt its sting, and notes he split several of the boards for kindling because he never valued the work.
  • A revival preacher rails against a fiddle as the devil's own instrument. Eric Hermannson sits at a Free Gospel meeting with his violin on his knee while Asa Skinner works the room toward the Light. The narrator explains the fiddle is regarded as a very incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures, loathed by a hall of exiled farmhands more than the church organ itself.
  • A drunk small-town lawyer delivers the collection's harshest eulogy. At the wake for a dead sculptor, Jim Laird tells the Boston pupil sitting with him: that is the true and eternal wonder of it, that it can come even from such a dung heap as this. He says it of his own hometown, then excuses himself from the mourners filing into the next room.
  • An exiled music teacher refuses to leave a Nebraska concert hall. Aunt Georgiana, thirty years removed from the Boston Conservatory to a Red Willow County dugout, weeps through the whole second half of a Wagner matinee. When it ends she will not stand: I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go, dreading the cattle-tracked bluffs and molting turkeys waiting at home.
  • A suspended student's own drawing teacher is the only one who worries. Paul appears before the Pittsburgh High faculty in an opal pin and a red carnation, smiling through every accusation. His drawing master tells the others: I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence, there's something sort of haunted about it.
  • He steals from his employer and buries a flower before he dies. Paul lifts above two thousand dollars in checks and nearly a thousand in bank notes from Denny and Carson and spends a week living at the Waldorf. When the theft hits the Pittsburgh papers he walks the Pennsylvania rail line, buries one drooping carnation in the snow, and steps in front of the train.
Summarized by FreeSummarizer.com

•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: this is Cather before she found Nebraska as triumph, when the same prairie that later powers O Pioneers! and My Ántonia only produces people who cannot survive wanting more than it can give them.

Eleven stories of Nebraska prairie exile and East Coast hunger, Willa Cather's first collection closes with a Pittsburgh usher who steals two thousand dollars for one week of the beautiful life, then walks in front of a train rather than go back.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

Want the 30-second version of your own documents?

Summarize Pro batches your PDFs, papers and reports into this exact format, every key claim cited to its source page.

Open Summarize Pro →

More from the archive

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes/daily/the-memoirs-of-sherlock-holmesThe Country of the Blind, and Other Stories/daily/the-country-of-the-blind-and-other-storiesThe Happy Prince, and Other Tales/daily/the-happy-prince-and-other-talesThe Monkey's Paw/daily/the-monkey-s-paw