"A remarkable achievement."- "Christian Science Monitor". "Reading the articles now,...we can see them as part of a distinct American literary tradition. Other writers before Miss Cather, men like Howells and James, had made an art of the travel picture, and brought the image of Europe to the people of Boston and New York. Miss Cather was among the first to give an account of it to Nebraskans." - Leon Edel, "New York Times." Willa Cather was twenty-eight years old in the summer of 1902 when she saw England and France for the first time. Behind her stretched the Nebraska fields of her childhood and still ahead of her the world as it belongs only to great writers. The 1902 journey, coming ten years before she made her literary mark with "O Pioneers!", was unrepeatable, special in its effects on her artistic development. After disembarking at Liverpool, she toured the Shropshire country, got swallowed up by London, and then crossed the Channel to other skies - to Rouen, Paris, and the Riviera. These fourteen travel articles, written for a newspaper in Lincoln, Nebraska, and eventually collected and published in book form in 1956, are striking for first impressions colored by a future novelist's feeling for history and for beauty in unexpected forms.